Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And there had been another factor, one that cut te Mosca to the bone. There were a few Beetle-kinden in amongst the captives. There was the odd Ant, even a Wasp or two, renegades brought to heel. The demographics of her fellow captives did not represent those of the city they had been sieved from, however. Metyssa was in good company, for there were remarkable numbers of Spider-kinden present, despite the death sentence pronounced on their kind. There were what looked like most of the city’s fugitive Moth population. There were Grasshoppers and Dragonflies who had fled the Wasps once before, and had now failed to make good their escape a second time. There were some other Flies, quite a number of other Flies. The Wasps had been testing them, back in the cells. Te Mosca had been given a crossbow, of all things – a small model, though still one that she would have struggled with, had she been Apt enough to do anything with it. Because that was what was gnawing at her: they had been testing for Aptitude. Several Apt Flies had been released. Those who had failed the crossbow test had all remained in the cells, with the Spiders and the others, the scions of the Bad Old Days. The grand majority of the herd of frightened prisoners had been Inapt.

  And there had been a knowledge of that, in those Beetle faces that peered out from behind the shutters. And te Mosca had read clearly there: better them than us.

  The airship had been hard: cramped, stifling compartments with a derisory ration of water and no food. In the daylight the cargo hold had heated like an oven; at night the chill had crept from body to body. The Slave Corps officers had spent much of the time arguing amongst themselves. They were very obviously doing something suspect, and te Mosca did not sense the hand of General Tynan behind all of this.

  In her less rational moments she had imagined writing him a letter of complaint. A polite letter, of course, because she was who she was, but she would certainly take him to task. She indulged in such thoughts because she had been crammed in too far away from Metyssa or Poll Awlbreaker to know how they fared, or even if they still lived. As the Inapt seldom travelled well within the machines of the Apt, there had been a sluicing of vomit about everyone’s feet, and worse soon enough, as the most basic human needs of the captives went unmet. Around her, others had been dying: crushed, parched, succumbing to their wounds. The Slavers had just left the bodies. As a Fly, te Mosca could at least bear being crammed into a small space better than the larger kinden. And so she had crouched in a corner, knees to her chin, and fantasized about correspondence with the general of the Second Army because it gave her a feeble illusion that she could somehow influence her fate.

  And now they were somewhere behind Imperial borders, over lands she had never wanted to visit, and the airship was descending.

  She could get an eye to the slats and stare out, and see great expanses of open country: the mosaic of fields, with no sign of any town or city nearby. Nobody near her had any idea how far a vessel such as this might have travelled. They might be just inside the border or over the far side of the Empire by now.

  But there was something down there. She could just catch sight of it if she contorted herself at the crack. There was what looked like a camp. During the descent she was naive enough to assume it was for the mustering of armies.

  And then the airship had been tied off with its keel ten feet from the dusty ground, and the slavers had come and opened the hatches in its underbelly. They had gone from compartment from compartment, dragging out the captives and just throwing them down, let them land how they may. With Fly-manacles killing her Art, the drop was terrifying to te Mosca.

  Looking around after her bruising landing, that terror did not go away.

  A hand fell on her shoulder, and she saw that Metyssa had fought her way through the crowd to her. Numbly, she let herself be dragged over to where Poll was sitting, clutching at a twisted ankle.

  ‘Can you help him?’ the Spider asked desperately, and of course te Mosca should have become the instant professional, kneeling down to offer what healing she could. But she just stood there, with her mind full of what she had seen before Metyssa had grabbed her. Her only thought was, No. I can’t help any of us.

  There had been cages. A great host of cages, stacked two and three tall as though some Wasp had seen the poorest ghettos of Helleron and been determined not to be outdone. They had been full of human bodies – many of them Spider-kinden, but plenty of others too. Then there had been the rings of people just sitting out in the open, ankles manacled to great metal stakes driven into the hard earth. And, after them, there had been a pit like a strip mine, and she had known without looking that it, too, had been thronging with people, people on top of people.

  And even now, the airship was disgorging the last of its human cargo, and more slavers were moving in to shift them towards that great maw in the earth. Te Mosca had a horror, then: a horror of being just one tiny mote in a vast mass of the dehumanized, the disenfranchised, the faceless. She had thought about what it might be like to be a slave, sometimes. She had wondered idly – oh, the luxury of the Collegiate life! – what master her own skills might attract. She was valuable, of course: a scholar and a doctor. No doubt she would be plucked out, bought at a good price. She had imagined how she might nobly change the Empire from within, given half the chance.

  Now she saw the reality: here were not hundreds but thousands of people, surely. Each face, each body, had its history, its special skills, its memories, its reasons for being cherished and preserved. And, just as obviously, they were nothing to the Wasps but a bulk commodity, something to be shipped and sold by the hundredweight. The slavers played no favourites. Whatever they sought from this appalling morass of massed captivity, they cared nothing whatsoever about who their victims were. The cages, the pit, they were like some Apt machine designed to strip the individuality and humanity from whoever was thrust into them.

  And then there was another officer coming up, waving his hands and shouting. His helm was pushed back, revealing a puffy red face. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘What do you think you’re up to?’

  Plainly he was a superior officer and te Mosca felt a sudden rush of relief, because of course this must be a mistake. All of this had been some terrible error. And – she was not proud of the thought, but it came to her from the meanest part of her being – even if it was not an error for the rest, surely it was an error for her. Did they not know who she was?

  And then she listened to the conversation between the slavers, the camp staff and those who had come on the airship, and she understood. It was just that the pit was already so full that they could not possibly fit so many new slaves in. The camp commander had a wild expression on his face, a man close to the end of his leash, but apparently for logistical reasons and not humanitarian ones.

  ‘What are we supposed to do with them, then?’ the airship slavers demanded.

  And the answer was simple: as there was no material for new cages, they needed a second pit. That was when the shovels were passed out to the stronger-framed of the slaves, for Imperial policy forfend that the inferior kinden should have their mass grave dug by their betters.

  Thirty-One

  Reinforcements were coming down the rail line from Helleron; troops rushed in from all points of the Empire, whoever could be mobilized in time. The Sarnesh were on their way, too, with a pan-Lowlander army and a new tactician.

  The core of the force taking a stand against them in the ruins of Malkan’s Stand had originally been intended as a garrison force for Collegium and had since become a field army by default. The colonel in charge, a man named Brakker, had arrived not long before with elements of the First Army, and his feints and manoeuvres had kept the Sarnesh confined in their city up until Collegium had fallen. After that, and with Tynan’s orthopter messengers even then turning around and refuelling, they had fallen back eastwards. They were operating almost entirely without orders, but the colonel knew that the Sarnesh could not be allowed to march unimpeded towards the Imperial border. He sent daily for more troops and
artillery, and asked that General Tynan be allowed to come and take command, bringing the veteran Second with him.

  For more than a tenday, Brakker’s forces had been on the retreat, but they had done everything in their power to make the Sarnesh advance difficult: poisoned wells, broken up the rail line, littered the terrain with mines and traps. All that while, the Ants’ own pilots were flying almost constantly overhead in their ersatz Stormreaders, making strafing runs and clumsily dropping the occasional bomb. Brakker was no tested battlefield officer, but a good logistician and planner, and he did everything he could to slow the Sarnesh, apart from actually taking a stand against them.

  Word had come from Tynan. He and his army had been called to the capital – the Second to defend it, he himself to account for his decisions. It was a chilling thought that, even in this moment of crisis, they were all still being judged by the Rekef, by the Red Watch, by the Empress herself.

  The Sarnesh had been closing the distance steadily, and once the lost garrison force reached the ruins of the Stand their colonel knew that they would get no better terrain to turn and hold the Ants at sword point for as long as possible. This place had once been the pride of Sarn, an indestructible fortress intended to last the ages, save that the Eighth had brought it low with the newest artillery, and now only craggy ruins were left. Ruins were better than an open field, though, so Brakker started refortifying as best he could, and setting up what little light artillery he had been left with.

  Then, with the Sarnesh now absurdly close, the reinforcements had arrived down the rails from Helleron: a ragbag of disassociated units with brief orders to hold firm until further notice. The newcomers had real artillery, at least, and a good number of engineers, plus half a dozen Farsphex orthopters to at least dull the edge of the Sarnesh air superiority. The troops themselves included two thousand Light Airborne, who were so new to the uniform that the colonel considered it a wonder that half of them could even fly. To give them some backbone, General Marent of the Third had detached a couple of hundred heavy infantry from his own men and sent them along – strictly without orders, the colonel surmised. Then there were the Auxillians: Ants from Maille and Monas, Grasshoppers from Jhe Lien, all come to join the colonel’s own sizeable contingent of Vesserett Bee-kinden and give their lives for the Empire.

  Not that this last was likely to be an honour unique to the Auxillians, Brakker knew. Hold until further notice was not the sort of order any commanding officer looked forward to receiving. At least their force now equalled a more respectable fraction of the Sarnesh in numbers, and perhaps the Ants’ firebrand tactician might take a moment to consider the potential losses on both sides when he came hoping to prise the Wasps from their makeshift fortifications.

  Milus looked over the entrenched Wasps and their allies and laughed briefly.

  ‘What’s amusing you, Tactician?’ Stenwold asked him. He and Kymene had been trailing the Sarnesh leader as he stalked through the camp, and at last as he came to view the enemy. Even with the Wasps in sight, Milus was not being very forthcoming about his plans.

  ‘Don’t you see how the tide’s turned?’ the Ant asked them. ‘For too long the Empire’s had the initiative, but now look at them repeating our mistakes. We couldn’t hold out here when there was still a fortress to hide inside. What chance have they got?’

  ‘They have the chance to buy time for the balance of their forces,’ Kymene pointed out.

  Milus made a doubtful noise. ‘I don’t see any of the Second. It looks as if the Gears are on the run. I’d hoped to find them here as well.’

  ‘You were hoping to be outnumbered?’

  Milus smiled pleasantly. ‘Tomorrow we will smash the Wasps. I’d rather we smashed as many of them as we can. I’d rather that balance of their forces was as small as possible.’

  ‘You seem very confident. Perhaps you might tell us why so, given that you no doubt expect us to commit our own forces,’ Kymene put forwards.

  ‘I am confident, and you have agreed to abide by my battle plans,’ he told them implacably. ‘Have your forces ready for a fight tomorrow, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘No night attack?’ queried Stenwold.

  ‘Not this time.’ That smile of his was maddening, and no doubt Milus knew it. ‘In fact, we’ll give them a couple of hours to watch us getting ready, just to rub it in. I want them to know exactly what we’re doing.’ He looked at their expressions and then laughed again; the sound was chilling to Stenwold, because Ants didn’t laugh. Not out loud, not like that. Milus was playing at being a human being for their benefit: jovial Uncle Milus.

  ‘If you didn’t trust me, what are you doing here with your soldiers?’ the tactician asked them both. ‘You have some other war to fight? There are a great many Wasps out there, War Master, Commander. We will devour them piece by piece, but I will still need all our forces. I’m not going to waste any bodies on foolishness.’

  But you may waste them on what you consider necessity, Stenwold filled in silently, guessing that Kymene was thinking the same. And if so, it won’t be your own Sarnesh that you waste, I’ll wager.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll give out the battle order, and you’ll see what I intend. Master Maker, I have a great respect for you . . . I hear the Wasps call you “General” and you are truly a tactician amongst your people. But a Beetle-kinden tactician all the same, and there are reasons nobody ever heard of such a thing. I know you consider my people simple and direct and predictable, but we understand war and the use of weapons – all manner of weapons. Trust me, and we will carry the battle tomorrow.’

  Stenwold would have to be satisfied with that, because the tactician was now pointedly busying himself with the administration of his army, and so any other discussion would have to wait.

  With dusk on its way, Milus retreated to his tent in the midst of the Sarnesh camp, and it was there that Stenwold went looking for him, guided in by silent sentries and knowing that unspoken word of his arrival would have reached the tactician the moment he made his presence known.

  ‘War Master,’ Milus greeted him. ‘Only an hour out of my company and here you are once more.’ Again such an utterly un-Ant-like comment that Stenwold was momentarily thrown. He had caught Milus sitting on a folding stool inside his tent, reading by the light of a hanging lamp – not a scout’s report or a quartermaster’s tally but what looked like a Collegiate novel, some lurid tale. He was quite sure that the whole odd impression had been planned purely to unbalance him, constructed even while he still picked his way through the camp.

  ‘There is one other matter that I wished to speak about with you in private,’ Stenwold confirmed, refusing to be discomfited.

  Milus shrugged. ‘Speak.’

  ‘You have a prisoner, a Fly woman named Lissart. I am aware that she has travelled with the army and is here in this camp.’

  For a moment he saw a change: the false expression freezing on Milus’s face, the body language grinding unattended to a halt. Then: ‘What of it?’ and a little more caution, perhaps, in the way the words came out.

  ‘I would like her released.’

  ‘She’s a Wasp agent.’

  ‘Nonetheless.’

  Milus rolled his eyes, back in full mummery now, but Stenwold wondered just what the Fly girl meant to him, that mention of her had momentarily dragged him out of his charade.

  ‘This is because of that man of yours, is it?’ the Ant asked him. ‘The awful spy – the one who was in Solarno with her.’

  ‘His name is Laszlo,’ Stenwold stated. ‘I admit he’s far from the perfect spy, but there is a difference between spy and agent, and he excels in the field of action. The recovery of my city owes a great deal to his hard work.’

  ‘And he’s put you up to this.’

  ‘Before Collegium fell, he asked for my help, my intervention,’ Stenwold replied. ‘Since then, he’s not pressed hard but I know he still wants her back, and I owe him, Milus.’

  No doubt the Ant had a great de
al of uncomplimentary things to say about that sort of thinking, but he kept them to himself and just remarked, ‘She worked for the Wasps. I still have a use for her.’

  ‘I’m told you’ve tortured her.’

  Again that momentary stillness, leaving Stenwold wondering, increasingly uneasily, about why Milus cared – about why this conversation was even necessary.

  ‘What of it?’ The same careless response, but with a sharp edge ready to be unsheathed. And then, before Stenwold could speak, ‘It is a tool of statecraft and of war. Or it is everywhere else except Collegium.’

  ‘Some would say that is what makes us better than the Empire.’

  Milus cast the book aside in a single, swift motion, one of incredible contained violence, so that the bundle of pages almost exploded against the tent wall, its bindings splitting at the spine. When he stood, he seemed quite calm, but that brief abandon was all the more shocking for that.

  ‘The goal of Sarn in this conflict is not to be better than the Empire. It is to be more victorious, War Master. Any measure to achieve that end is permitted. Sarn will survive, and for that to happen it appears that the Wasp Empire must fall. If the Wasps had come to us at the start and started talking terms, then perhaps you and I would be standing in very different places, but history has given you me as an ally, and for that you should be grateful. I am not interested in the navel-gazing of Beetle philosophers. I am interested in winning.’

  ‘And she helps you in this, does she? Somehow there are still secrets you’ve not already prised from her?’ After all, none of this was exactly revelation.

  ‘She heard a great deal about various Imperial personalities while she was in their employ. She has a good ear for gossip, and I may wish to ask her about whoever we end up against next.’ Milus held up a hand. ‘Are we two truly on the verge of coming to blows over one Fly-kinden turncoat?’