Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  One such prison facility was within ten miles of Capitas. Slaves stripped from the capital itself had been sent there, but recently the place had become full to bursting with Spiders taken in the war, the overflow from other places already starting to go septic with overcrowding and lack of care.

  The inmates were crammed almost shoulder to shoulder into wooden cages still rough with splinters. Whether a slave ate or not depended on the charity of those around them, since there was no way for the Wasps to ensure that food and water reached them all. Each morning there were a few more dead, and all too often the bodies could not be removed.

  The place reeked of death, of excrement, of the sour reek of human desperation. The Slave Corps contingent there was constantly being rotated out because men had a tendency to desert rather than face what they found themselves contributing to, or else they began to consider un-Imperial ideas about mercy.

  One evening there was a visitor.

  The figure approached the gates with a swift stride, as confident as a general, although no Wasp-kinden ever looked as he did. The guards barring his way noted the armour of immaculate black and yellow in a style a thousand years old, ancient Mantis-kinden sentinel plate, a multitude of interlocking pieces, elegant and barbed, something from another time.

  They could not quite see the face within the helm, even with the visor up. He was pale, they would say later, and he had surpassingly cold eyes.

  ‘I am from the Empress,’ he told them. ‘I am come for the slaves.’

  He was a Mantis, and everyone knew how Mantids felt about slavery. The prison commander was sent for, a Major Vorken of the Slave Corps, a veteran of the Twelve-year War. The visitor waited patiently for him.

  The major, as it happened, had been in the capital recently and had seen the Empress. He recognized the apparition before him as her bodyguard, but that raised more questions than it answered.

  ‘What are you here for, sir?’ The honorific was a wager: surely no Mantis outranked a major, but to omit it where it was due would doubtless incur harsher consequences than to award it unmerited.

  ‘I am come for the slaves.’ Again that cold voice, the intonation identical.

  Vorken had been uneasy from the moment he set eyes on this man. Now real alarm was rising up within him. ‘The prisoners here are being held by Her Majesty’s own order. I cannot countenance any attempt to release or move them without her written instruction.’ And surely she would send her unloved Red Watch with such orders, anyway, and not this freakish figure from a history book.

  ‘I am come for the slaves.’ Again. ‘Do not attempt to impede me.’

  The figure was past the gate before the guards could react, the major stumbling frantically back to keep out of the intruder’s reach. It was a terrible moment of choice. If the man was the servant of the Empress and acting in that capacity, then any action taken against him was nothing short of treason – crossed pikes for sure. If he had broken from his mistress, though, then letting him meddle with the slaves – perhaps creating some great slave army within march of Capitas itself – would be a betrayal of both the Empire and the corps itself.

  Vorken made his call. ‘Stop him! Bring him down! Alive if you can!’

  The Mantis turned as a score of slavers descended upon him, noted their stings and snapbows, and then continued towards the nearest cage door.

  ‘Bring him down!’ the major shouted again, furiously.

  Stingshot crackled, boiling off that antique armour without marking it and, though the odd snapbow bolt penetrated, the occupant seemed barely to notice, as though what was inside it was proof against mere steel darts, no matter how vigorously they were thrown.

  The helm turned back towards them, and Major Vorken was sure that he saw some spark of disappointment in the way the Mantis held himself.

  Then he was moving amongst the men who had attacked him, without seeming to clear the distance in between, cutting them down – cutting them apart – with ruthless efficiency even as they realized they were being attacked. A half-dozen were dead in that first wave of blows, and the rest were scattering, shooting back at nothing, wounding only their comrades.

  He hunted them down. It was swifter than Vorken would have thought possible. He stalked shadow to shadow, and Vorken lost track of him almost immediately, then located him again with each cry and scream as the man danced through the city of cages before the staring, starved eyes of the slaves.

  Then silence. A minute had passed, or perhaps even less.

  Vorken took a deep breath. His life had been fraying at the edges since he had realized that the prison camp could simply not continue to support itself any more, that his orders had carried within them the seeds of their own destruction. Now this man had arrived and seemed to be simply the embodiment of the disaster he had known was coming.

  Vorken turned slowly and, of course, the figure was there. Its blade, one of those Mantis claws that folded back against the arm, was barely bloody.

  ‘I am come for the slaves.’ Pale lips moving, the tone unchanged, as though a score of Vorken’s men were not now dead.

  ‘Take them.’ Waiting for the death strike.

  It did not come. The Mantis had lost interest in him. Instead, he strode to the nearest cage – crammed with two score Spiders in a space where the major would normally have kept a dozen slaves at most.

  The blade flashed again, and abruptly the wooden grille of the door was sagging open.

  Empress, forgive me, Vorken thought – although he knew she was not the forgiving type.

  Then the Mantis went to work. Not to free the slaves. Of course not. Mantids despised slaves as much as they did slavers, it seemed, and despised Spiders more than anyone. But even that could not account for what Vorken was watching. This was not hatred, that most enduring of human traits. This was something beyond the experience of a Slave Corps major, an order of magnitude beyond anything he himself had ever done or ordered.

  The Mantis moved on to the next cage. By now the slaves – quicker on the uptake than their masters, perhaps – had begun to shout and cry out for help. Vorken and his surviving men stood silent and paralysed. Help was something they had already tried to offer, although they had not realized that was what they had been doing.

  Cage by cage, he was killing them. He was killing all of them, as coldly and methodically as a machine. There were thousands of slaves crammed into Vorken’s camp, of all ages, of all kinden, soldiers and civilians both. The Mantis was making no distinction.

  After the man had made an abattoir of the third cage, something snapped within Vorken and he moved to intervene. It took a single glance of those freezing eyes to stop him in his tracks. That lone moment when he might force himself to do something passed in deadly silence, then he stepped back.

  The hysterical shrieking extended across the whole camp now, a cacophony of human fear and dread producing a composite sound Vorken had never heard before. It almost seemed that his Inapt charges were finding a horror in what was going on that went beyond mere inescapable death.

  Vorken knew other Slave Corps officers, and many of the other camp commanders. He gritted his teeth and, hunching his shoulders against the unbearable sounds of massacre, began writing them messages as swiftly as his shaking hands could manage the pen.

  Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic, engineer and saboteur, had expected to be debriefed long before this. After returning from the Exalsee expedition, he had anticipated punishment, or at the very least being sidelined on to some low-priority job. The death of Dariandrephos, whilst anticipated as a possibility, had not been quite the result that had been expected from him.

  Instead of a reprimand, he had merely received curt orders from General Lien that sent him off to Helleron and Sonn, where the chemical manufactories were already producing the noxious Bee-killer. Having been kept waiting for Gannic’s recovery of the formula, they were now churning it out as fast as could be.

  Gannic understood the tactical uses for the st
uff – a canister smuggled into an enemy camp, say, or thrown in amidst an army by catapult. Beyond that, somewhere his mind was somewhat loath to go, he was aware of the greater potential – indeed the original test that had been envisaged. Get enough of the stuff together and you could smother a city.

  They had a great deal of the Bee-killer by now, and those factories were still working at full tilt.

  He had travelled there under the command of a Red Watch captain who had barely looked at him and certainly not disclosed his name. Gannic had heard plenty about the Red Watch, and this man had confirmed all of that: hostile, quick to criticize, never explaining himself, his orders vacillating between patronizing and insufficient. Perfect officer material therefore.

  Back in Capitas again, with their cargo of death, he was summoned to Lien immediately to account for himself.

  The Engineering Corps’ only general looked as if he could use a little more sleep, Gannic decided. He braced himself for a tongue-lashing because he had failed to accomplish the Chasme mission perfectly – or even particularly well – and because he was a halfbreed, and therefore paradoxically, whilst less was expected of him, any failure was deemed all the more blameworthy.

  Instead, Lien just scowled. ‘Report,’ he barked. And when Gannic tried to tell him about Chasme and the Exalsee he waved it away.

  ‘I’ve read about that. Report on the Bee-killer.’

  Gannic’s unease changed direction and he spent a careful twenty minutes setting out the quantities of the chemical amassed, rates of production, logistics of transport. When he had finished, Lien remained silent, not even glancing at him. The lean, bald general seemed to be staring into some future that the man didn’t like overmuch.

  This is where I get slapped down. Indeed, Gannic pressed the question, because a flat reprimand to put him in his place would at least restore his faith in the machinery of Empire. After all, at least he would know his place then, however hard he was returned to it.

  ‘General,’ he hazarded, ‘what’s it all for?’

  Lien’s eyes flicked towards him, but the expected annoyance only flashed briefly and went out of the general’s face. What was left was a man looking older than Gannic remembered: a man for whom the wheels of both artifice and state were suddenly spinning too fast.

  ‘There are camps,’ the general replied. If he was surprised to find himself explaining matters of Imperial policy to a halfbreed lieutenant, he did not show it. Indeed, he seemed almost relieved to get the words out. ‘The Empress is amassing a sizeable number of slaves and captives.’

  Gannic frowned, baffled. The question, To what end, sir? stuck in his throat. Having his previous impertinence actually answered left him frightened. Being told such things seemed bad for his health.

  ‘But such matters are not your concern!’ A new voice intervened, an unsteady voice. ‘Give the halfbreed his orders and send him on his way, Lien. She has other work for you.’

  Lien did not look at the newcomer, but Gannic could not resist. He saw a man who had once been strong framed but seemed almost eaten away now, as though by a disease. His eyes were certainly fever-bright, and they flinched and twitched as if constantly trying to stare into the sun.

  After a long moment of blankness, Gannic found a name to tack onto this sick-looking creature. Can that really be General Brugan of the Rekef?

  ‘You’re to take an airship loaded with the Bee-killer to Myna, under Red Watch orders,’ Lien said bluntly. ‘Do everything that’s asked of you. Then come back. There’ll be more.’

  Myna? Gannic turned the city over in his mind. Not a place that anyone felt over-fond of, surely, save for the Mynans themselves. And he had the feeling that their views had just ceased to count for anything.

  ‘Do you understand your orders?’ Lien demanded of him. Gannic tried to lock eyes with him, but the general shook off his gaze without even acknowledging it.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ What else, in the end, could Gannic say?

  When she awoke, he was there, and she could feel the blood inside him, full of it as a tick and yet still hungry: Tisamon.

  For a moment she thought he had come to challenge her. Never mind what he might have done to amass such power, she was ready for him to turn it on her now, to wrestle for his freedom. If she had shown any weakness just then, perhaps he might have done so. Instead she struck the instant she was aware of him, holding him with her raw power, and then binding him anew with his oaths and honour and, in the process, finding out the truth.

  ‘What have you done?’ she screamed at him. ‘I need them! I need them to die for me! You’ve wasted them – what if I don’t have enough now?’

  He weathered her outburst and told her, I have saved them for you.

  For a moment she misunderstood him, but, yes – the power was still within him. He was not a thief of blood, but a receptacle.

  You need them, but you need them dead, he told her. For you I have done this. I shall slay all your enemies. I shall lay their very essence at your feet. Make use of me.

  For there it was, a growing frustration she had sensed in him: knowing that the whole world was engaged in war and he could play only the smallest part. The great battles that a creature such as he was made for were fought only in the oldest of histories, but so were the great rituals that she sought to emulate.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed at last. ‘In this you can serve. You cannot kill them all. Not even you could kill them all, or even most of them. I will yet have to rely on the toys of the artificers, to make up the balance. Their deaths shall be sweeter at your hand, though – true Inapt deaths to feed the ritual. But I will need to calculate, to redraw my figures. This changes the measure of my power.’ And here her eyes grew hard. ‘You will kill only on my command, Tisamon. I know you sought to please me, and I am pleased, but you will shed blood on my word, and not on your own whim. I have no use for servants that will not obey.’

  For a moment he bucked against her, straining at the leash, and she sensed the words before he said them, and shouted him down with, ‘Don’t you dare believe that you know better than I what is best for me – or for my Empire! Too many men have thought just that before, and the world is well rid of them!’

  Still she sensed resistance, and for a moment she was going to banish him from her presence. But what mischief might he get up to then? Instead, she turned away from him, anger and contempt in every line of her, freezing him to a mere statue with the removal of her attention. Let him stand there and fret, until she let him loose again.

  She was going to send for Brugan, but this new development had focused her mind on her grand plan once more, and she found herself reviewing her calculations, considering how best to make use of Tisamon’s little mutiny. The magical world around her seemed more alive now than ever, even here in Capitas at the heart of an Apt Empire. A strange spring had arrived – or perhaps it was just that the world knew what she intended, and held its breath.

  A feat the like of which has not been seen since before the revolution. Long before.

  And a distant echo, though louder than before, calling: Seda.

  Not Tisamon’s harsh whisper, but the faint and far-off voice of her unwanted sister, the rival she had plotted to destroy for so long. Che.

  How strange now that she felt the Beetle girl to be almost a part of herself. It was through Che that Seda had witnessed the extremity of the horror that the Moths had trapped in that closed-off subterranean world. Without Che as her unwilling advance scout, she would never have known the abomination of the Worm that her own actions were even now unleashing upon the world. Che, I broke the Seal.

  She could not tell whether she sensed anger or blame emanating from the girl, but she knew she deserved both. Not often does an Empress apologize, but I have done a terrible thing.

  Yes, there she felt it. She could almost see the girl nodding vigorously.

  But never mind, Che. I’m mending it. I’m mending the world. I’ve found a way. Lend me your power, Che.
Lend me your strength, to extend my reach that much further, to be that much more certain of what I wish to do.

  Was that questioning she sensed, across the appalling distance between them? Surely Che deserved to know. Even she must see the necessity, for she knew what the darkness held. She knew how important it was that such things be kept from the sun.

  At whatever cost. At any cost.

  Seda tried to explain. She reached out as far as she could, trying to force her plans into her surrogate sister’s head, to bring an understanding there of the scale and boldness of her endeavour. She could not know what, if anything, was understood. They were far apart in so many ways, even with the Seal finally gone from between them.

  Trust me, Che, she was reduced to thinking. And how absurd a thing was that, to be asking of the girl. Trust me. This is the only way.

  And Sartaea te Mosca looked out over the West-Empire and shivered.

  They were packed into the big airship like livestock – or perhaps worse than livestock. Animals tended to be valuable commodities, after all, to be transported with care.

  The Slave Corps had been in a mad panic, back in Collegium. They had raided the overstuffed cells with whip and club, forcing their prisoners out into the open and herding them towards the airfields. Around them, the city had seemed to be at war again. Every Wasp soldier te Mosca had seen had been in armour, and most had been running somewhere. There had been smoke on the air. It’s an uprising! she had thought at first. Where there had been Collegiate citizens visible, though, they had looked as agitated as the Wasps, just faces peering from behind half-shuttered windows for the most part. Whatever the Empire had been reacting to, it had not been them.

  Even so, she had been waiting for the prisoners to turn on their captors. They had outnumbered the slavers by dozens to one. Many even had unbound hands. Surely someone would throw a punch, wrest a weapon from a soldier, do something. And yet they were prodded and cuffed through the streets, and nobody rebelled. A few tried to run, but stingshot caught them almost before they had broken from the mass of their fellows. The Slave Corps were professionals, each of them more than able to read the eddy and flow of a body of human stock in trade. They had been maintaining control of superior numbers of lesser kinden for generations.