Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  But I cannot. That is all there is to it.

  ‘I am a soldier,’ he repeated. ‘I will fight this war, and no further. Because the moment we try to seize the Empire, we will lose it, all of it. And then the Lowlanders will just pick over our bones when we’ve finished killing each other.’

  Marent’s mouth twisted unhappily, and Tynan wondered just how far ahead he had planned into the reign of Emperor Tynan the First. He had no counter-argument, though, and neither did any of the others.

  Thirty-Five

  The soldiers of the Worm were right behind them, and Totho could feel them catching up. Their presence was like a blanket laid over his mind, stifling those parts of it that understood the weapon he carried and the artifice that had gone into its construction. At the same time, there was almost no light – just his lantern and a few brands carried by the fleeing refugees. If I could achieve range. But at the distance he would need from his enemy to know his own mind, he would have no target but the vast canvas of the darkness itself.

  He heard the first cries from the blackness behind, indicating the slowest of the fugitives falling to the blades of the pursuit. Ahead, others were breaking off from the flight – the boldest, the most desperate, those who had dependants still fleeing. Totho caught mad, wheeling glimpses of their faces as they gave up their chance at life: great solid Mole Crickets towering over him, the runners dodging about them as though they were features of the landscape; stocky Beetle-kinden wielding stolen Worm swords; Moth-kinden slingers who perhaps would trust to their wings to carry them away at the last.

  Messel, he saw too. Messel was now stopping, a sling in his hands. A blind man with a sling. It seemed to summarize everything that Totho had so far seen of this insane, terrifying place.

  ‘Move!’ he yelled. ‘Messel, go! I need you to take me to Che!’ A Beetle man pushed past, a screaming child laid over his shoulder. Totho reached for the eyeless man’s shoulder but Messel just stepped away, sensing, somehow, where his hand would fall.

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Come on, you witless imbecile!’ Totho shrieked at him. ‘Move, you blind bastard!’

  Messel’s teeth were bared, and Totho saw that he was shaking with fright. He had his sling whirling, though, and the fighting sounded very close. ‘I am doing her will,’ he spat.

  ‘Who – Che?’ Totho demanded. ‘You, this . . . Do you even . . .?’

  A vast Mole Cricket woman barrelled past towards the fighting, bellowing out what sounded more like a dirge than a battle cry. She had a great metal hammer in one hand, already whirling in a wide underarm stroke, and it made contact even as she passed Totho, sending one of the Worm’s bodies flying, broken and loose jointed, into the darkness.

  ‘Please, Messel!’ Totho insisted. ‘Che needs to . . . I need to get to Che. I . . .’ He swore furiously, setting his lantern down then and skidding it across the stony ground towards the onrush of the Worm.

  He saw only a brief glimpse of their charge before he went fleeing into the dark, scrambling, battering his mailed shins against the rocks, then understanding fell back into his mind, his distance from the Worm just sufficient for it, and he turned and levelled his snapbow.

  He saw them approaching there, just shadows dashing past his lamp, and he loosed and loosed, emptying the weapon, then slotting another magazine into place and emptying it again, every shot a hit, every hit a kill – and sometimes more than one, as the bolts tore through more than one body. But he ran out of bolts before they ran out of Worm, and when his weapon clicked empty, they were still coming. Then one of them kicked his lamp, quite inadvertently, and that bright, hopeful flare was plunged into darkness.

  He could see the few brave torches of the fugitives, and he made for them, skidding and stumbling into their ranks, desperate to find Messel, to drag him from the fray and abscond with the man so that the knowledge lurking behind his eyeless visage might be preserved. Then someone drove a blade at him and Totho staggered back under the impact, the now-useless snapbow dropping from his hands.

  The Worm were on him, three or four of them, but he got his own sword out as their blows fell on his armour, one arm up to protect his head. Should have worn the helm. Not as though there’s much to see down here, anyway.

  He lunged, with one of the enemy virtually falling onto his blade, the bronze scales of its armour parting with minimal resistance against his keen steel.

  He was no swordsman, not really, but he had fought. He had been trained in the Prowess Forum, and marched with the Empire, and held the bridge at Khanaphes.

  He had no sense of the rest of the world, right then, hacking at everything that presented itself in the hope that it was an enemy. His edge bit home over and over, though he took half a dozen blows for each one he struck. They rattled and banged against his indomitable mail, a constant shock and jolt that he almost found himself becoming used to.

  Given a few moment’s breath, after killing his seventh, he donned his helm. He had been a fool to go without it. In his head was still that yawning abyss where understanding had once sat, but he had now completed his shell that was hard proof against the weapons of the enemy. They were faster than him, and they were so very many, but he let them break like a tide against his carapace, body after body of them as the Worm tried to bring him down. Its coils were all about him, laying hands on him, stabbing and hacking and sawing, but he lopped at wrists and thrust at faces and cut and cut and cut, and the soulless husks fell away, and tripped him even after they were dead.

  Then the last fugitive lantern, which had been burning on its side where some desperate slave had dropped it, went out.

  He found it made no difference. He had long ago lost any ability to dodge or to ward off the enemy, and they were all around him, leaping onto the razor of his blade, dragging at him, pulling him down.

  His sword lodged deep in one and left his hand, but by then he had barely been able to swing it. He felt hands on him, crawling for weak points but not understanding how the mail was made: a blade trying to pry between the lames of his shoulderguards, nails scratching impotently at his helm but missing the eyeslot.

  Then nothing, a sudden cessation of movement, so that he lay half covered by the fallen, sightless and alone.

  Or not alone? It was dark, so how could he know what was creeping softly towards him. Bizarrely, this sensation of uncertainty inspired a deeper dread than the actual fighting had. How much better to know that they were trying to kill you.

  ‘Do you live?’

  A voice. A human voice. Though his enemies had looked like men, he could not imagine them aspiring to anything so familiar as speech.

  ‘Stranger, do you live?’

  A voice he had heard recently. Messel’s voice.

  ‘Just about,’ he replied to the darkness. ‘I lost my sword. Get these bastards off me.’

  He held still, feeling dead flesh slide and shift away, cringing from the unlimited blackness on all sides. At last he sat up, feeling a thousand small bruises, but no more.

  That’s good mail. And he properly understood that it was, and why, and realized that the enemy were gone for now. And my armour and my sword, they are an artifice the enemy cannot take from me. I do not need to understand their metallurgy or their forging to benefit from them.

  ‘We got the lot?’ he asked.

  ‘They are dead. You and I live. I stood in your shadow as you fought. Your last enemy, I slew myself.’ Messel sounded slightly awed. ‘You are truly her champion.’

  ‘I . . .’ It sounded wrong, spoken like that. ‘I came to rescue her.’

  There was a choking sound, and for a moment Totho could not identify it.

  Messel was laughing awkwardly. He probably did not get much opportunity to do so.

  ‘Rescue?’ the blind man wheezed. ‘From what? From all of the Worm? From my world?’

  ‘I thought she would be . . .’ Someone’s prisoner, or something, not queen of the new revolution. ‘That’s why I came, anyway.’<
br />
  A pause long enough for Totho to worry that Messel had just crept away, until at last he demanded, ‘Get me light,’ just to prompt a reaction. ‘A lantern, Or just something that will burn. I have a lighter here.’

  ‘You are a magician?’

  ‘Piss off,’ Totho snapped, and then, a little more gently. ‘I . . . you don’t need to be a magician to set stuff on fire, believe me.’

  ‘To have got here at all, you surely must be a magician.’ There was a strained tone to the man’s voice.

  ‘There was a cave, and your Worm bastards had been in and out of it. I wanted to go and get Che out, so I went in after them. No magic, just my feet.’

  He heard a sharp, ragged breath, and then something prodded him. When he snatched at it, he found a handful of leathery stalks.

  ‘You walked into the lair of the Worm? From the outside?’

  Totho waited until after he had coaxed a flame from his steel lighter and applied it to the stalks. The tough fungal growth took light only stubbornly, leaving him staring dumbly at the little gadget in his hand, its function and use rapidly fading from his mind.

  Which means . . .

  ‘They’re back!’ he spat, but Messel was already tugging at his arm.

  ‘Now is the time to run!’ And he was swiftly away on the trail of the fugitives. Totho ripped his sword from one of the bodies around him and then stumbled off in Messel’s wake, running straight into a world of darkness and trying to keep up, the blind leading the blind.

  ‘It’s not working,’ was Thalric’s harsh assessment. ‘Yes, we’re managing to get plenty of people out before the Worm-kinden turn up. But fight? A rebellion? I’ve seen them, Che. They can’t fight. They have no training, no discipline, borrowed weapons and precious little courage. Most of them have been afraid their whole life. They’re just slaves, Che.’

  ‘And you know about slaves,’ she said bitterly.

  He shrugged, needing to add nothing.

  ‘But . . . Myna,’ she persisted. ‘They threw off the Empire.’

  ‘And there were still some there who remembered a time before we invaded, and they are a warrior people, like the Ants, like my kinden. This lot? They’re hopeless, Che. Even the ones that have some heart are just getting themselves killed. And it’s worse than that. We’ve gathered a whole load with us here, yes, but we’ve not saved them from anything. We’re running out of everything. If the Worm hadn’t required its slaves to find their own food, everyone here would have starved long ago. But this is like living in a desert, down here. They’ve scoured this place bare already, and there are almost no stocks left.’

  They were in the midst of a great sprawling slum composed of the Worm’s slaves, people who had fled their homes with whatever they could carry, or nothing at all. A host of them stretched into the darkness on all sides, and behind Che their numbers scaled a cave-pocked rock face as well. They were desperate, all of them. Had they stayed where they were, then the Worm would have harvested most of them to aid it in its push towards the wider world, but it now seemed she had just delayed the inevitable.

  She looked from Thalric’s face to that of Tynisa, who had been brooding over her own thoughts. ‘Give me options, then,’ she urged them.

  She had been hoping for Tynisa to suggest some piece of Mantis-kinden aggression, some mad strike at the heart of the Worm. Instead, her foster-sister just shook her head. ‘I can’t fight, Che,’ she murmured. ‘Whatever this Worm does, it . . . I’m hurt, Che. The wound comes back, whenever they’re near, and I can’t get free of it. I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry.’

  Thalric grimaced. ‘As for me, I don’t know about your . . . end of things, but it’s the same problem. Yes, you can defeat a more numerous army, especially as these Worm-kinden aren’t exactly tacticians and don’t have much variety of troops. You need something more, though: better equipment, better training. If we could get them coming after us, and control where they went, then . . . traps maybe. These wretches are good for a rock-slide, but that needs very specific terrain, and we only get one shot at it in any engagement. And anything more complex than that . . . we have no artifice to rely on, because of their . . . that thing they do. What they take from us. And I’ve tried. I’ve even tried to make sharpshooters from our slingers, to kill off the scarred bastards. Except they’re not actually leading the fight. I get the feeling they can guide matters, add some strategy, but sometimes the Worms fight even better when they’re not there.’

  ‘Perhaps we can . . . attack their city,’ Che whispered. ‘That is where their master is, the mind behind them all. If we could . . . somehow . . .’

  ‘Che, Esmail’s just returned from there, and he says it can’t be done,’ Thalric cautioned. ‘He also says the place is crawling with them. All the Worms who aren’t hunting us or actually . . . heading up, whatever . . . are there, in that city. Which means that if we tried to go there, we’d basically end up fighting all the locals plus every single one of them who’s already trying to find us. Which is almost all of them. And it’s not as if this pack of bolt-fodder could pull off a sneak attack, even if the enemy couldn’t see in the dark . . . even if they ever actually slept, which Esmail says they don’t. And most of our fodder here aren’t even combatants, by any stretch of the definition.’

  Che was staring at him desperately, and she realized that this was the limit: that she had thought him sufficiently resourceful in ruthless ways she herself could not countenance, and that he would always have a plan. He just looked at her, a man who had left his hope behind, his face gaunt and pale in the unhealthy firelight.

  After having slept, cold and shivering on the hard stone, surrounded by the quietly mounting misery of those she had wanted to save, she woke and had no new answers, except to know that the pressing needs from before had only become more pressing.

  Then Messel arrived. She saw him heading through camp with a knot of people trailing in his wake – new arrivals – asking questions and being pointed towards her. It was strange, for to start with she had been almost unable to distinguish him from the rest of his eyeless kinden. Now she couldn’t imagine not knowing him. It was just a matter of looking beyond that absence.

  ‘Cheerwell,’ he hailed her. He looked grimy and ragged and worn to a nub, but terribly animated, as though something within him was on fire. ‘I must speak to you. Something remarkable has happened.’

  ‘I could use something remarkable,’ she replied sadly. ‘Sit with me, Messel, please. Tell me.’

  Tynisa and Thalric were just stirring, but the blind man’s next words startled them fully awake.

  ‘There is a name . . . a man you know. Totho, he called himself.’

  Che felt her world shift sideways abruptly; things she thought she had understood suddenly uncertain. ‘How can you know that name?’

  ‘I was with him,’ Messel told her. ‘He came here searching for you.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ she told him flatly. ‘He’s no . . . he’s nothing that could come here. There’s no way . . .’

  ‘He walked,’ Messel insisted. ‘He entered a cave he had seen the Worm use, in their raids.’ His hands clutched at the air, as though groping for understanding. ‘Cheerwell, the Seal, you said it cracked . . . and then that it was broken.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If only we had the Teacher,’ Messel muttered, for Esmail had brought back the news of Orothellin’s death. ‘I do not understand the way things were, in that time he spoke of, before this place was made as it is. But . . .’

  ‘The domain of the Worm – of the Centipede-kinden – was underground,’ Che said slowly. ‘That means . . .’

  ‘I understand “underground”, from the Teacher’s stories. But at that time there was no seal, and the Worm walked in and out of its domain, and he said that there were those of the Old World who walked in also – ancestors of some of us here. What now, with the Seal gone?’ Messel asked at last. ‘If the Seal kept us from the Old World, what keeps us
from it now?’

  Che stared at him, knowing that Thalric and Tynisa must be wearing kindred expressions.

  ‘You mean . . .’ the Wasp said, ‘we can get out.’

  Che took a deep breath. ‘Everyone can get out. Every single person can get out. If we can get people to some caves, any caves that carry on through into the world. It doesn’t defeat the Worm. It won’t save the lands above. But it can save the people here, for now. Messel . . . did Totho say where he came in?’

  ‘I know the place,’ the blind man told her. ‘There are caves there. They go . . . when I was there, they went nowhere. Now . . .’

  ‘Where is Totho?’ Tynisa asked.

  Che froze, an appalling dismay falling upon her. Why did I not even think to ask? For surely Totho was not amongst the handful that Messel had been trailing.

  Messel’s hands twitched, and he explained.

  He and Totho had been with a fleeing band of refugees. The Worm had been behind them, gaining pace, but it had still seemed as though they might break away, at some cost – that some at least of the fugitives might escape.

  Then the second Worm column had been sighted ahead of them. Messel did not know if this was some actual plan of the Worm, or just unfortunate chance. At that point, of course, it had not seemed to matter.

  ‘Some fought,’ he recounted sadly. ‘Most . . . just remembered how life had been under the Worm. That it had still been life, despite all. And they gave up: some the Worm killed, and others the Scarred Ones took away, to their city.’