Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She saw an explosion burst and bloom about one of the Sentinels, a Stormreader pulling into a tight turn to come back for another pass. The Wasp machine had not slowed.

  She was so busy watching that, that she missed the shot that actually impacted.

  It struck the far end of the carriage behind hers, and sent a whiplash of destruction all along the train. The carriage taking the brunt was flayed open, punched off the tracks and sent end over end, spilling soldiers and supplies. Straessa’s own carriage was yanked off the track itself, slewing on its side over the uneven ground, occupants slamming against the walls. Two other cars, in either direction, were derailed whilst the automotive itself continued driving up the track, even with the brakes applied as hard as could be. The carriages behind rammed their siblings that still lay partway across the track, shunting them to a grinding halt.

  And the Sentinels came on, shouldering aside the nearest Sarnesh automotives contemptuously.

  Straessa found herself sprawled on her back against the shutters of a window that would now only open on to bare ground. Every part of her ached but nothing seemed broken. For a second, feeling that the carriage had at least come to a stop, she stared with her single eye at the sunlight coming in through what was now the ceiling.

  Then she was shouting. ‘Out! Get out and get ready to fight. Grenades if you’ve got them! Get out or we’re all dead in here!’

  She curled herself into a ball to avoid being trampled to death by people following her orders. Those who could were evacuating sharply, piling out at either twisted end of the carriage or hauling themselves up out of the skyward-facing windows. Most seemed to have a snapbow at least. Which is better than me. Straessa had not even been carrying hers as she checked on the troops.

  With luck, by now the Sarnesh are doing something useful. She levered herself up, wincing at the all the bruises she was going to have. Come on, get moving, woman! Blearily she stumbled from the carriage into the abrasively bright daylight after her soldiers, dragging her rapier from its scabbard.

  She almost fell under the Sentinel as it charged past, slamming into the next skewed carriage, sending the entire car spinning about its midpoint. She heard screams from those caught in its wake. From somewhere nearby another leadshotter boomed.

  Straessa took her chance and ducked past before the machine could return, looking frantically for her people. They had formed up into approximate maniples of ten to twenty, but were keeping a lot of space between each other, which seemed good sense. Not sure why they need officers, really. They were also already shooting, using what cover the carriages and the rocky terrain gave them, and she saw Wasp Light Airborne dropping down and coursing overhead.

  Another Sentinel was coming up, following the rail line, its articulated body bunching and flexing as its legs pistoned furiously. For a moment she actually raised her little sword against it, in desperate defiance, but it was already breaking off, heading almost head to head against one of its brethren. She saw that it had been painted with a long streak of black on its segmented flanks. One of ours! For the Sarnesh had a handful of the machines taken from the vanished Eighth Army, just left vacant and untouched by whatever disaster had destroyed the Imperial force.

  She assumed that the two Sentinels were going to strike each other head-on. Before they got that close, though, the Sarnesh machine loosed with its leadshotter and she saw the ball skitter off the Imperial vehicle’s armour, doing no damage but deflecting its course so that, when they collided, the Sarnesh ran its prow into the flank of its enemy. Straessa flinched back from the tremendous impact, seeing both machines lurch away under it, the Imperial limping, with a couple of legs on that side trailing, and the Sarnesh brought almost to a stop by the collision, then slowly building up speed as it sought a new target.

  ‘Antspider!’ Gorenn dropped down beside her, an arrow ready on the string as always.

  ‘Report!’

  ‘Holding them off, Officer! There aren’t so many of their soldiers,’ the Dragonfly informed her, scanning all around. ‘Machines are fighting machines. They’ve been stopped, I think. We’re throwing them back.’

  ‘Was that it, then?’ Straessa frowned. ‘Just a desperate shot and then they’re spent? There must be more.’

  Gorenn shrugged, but Straessa’s mind was working feverishly, starting with, Now what would I do . . .? A moment later she was darting away down the track towards the emptied carriages. There were soldiers all over – Ants forming up with silent precision, Mynans charging past with swords and snapbows – but she was looking for people who were instead keeping still, trying to be overlooked. But in such a milling crowd, stillness itself was out of place.

  There . . . Curse it, I was right, and she was picking up speed, hoping Gorenn was following her. She had seen a Beetle-kinden crouching at one of the carriages still on the tracks, and no doubt the Sarnesh thought he was one of hers. He was a stranger, though, and wearing no uniform, and he was working on something at the carriage’s underside. Because if I myself was organizing this, I’d sneak a few artificers in to set some charges.

  He saw her even as she was running at him, eyes wide as he realized he’d been detected. He had no snapbow, but he brought out a shortsword quickly just as she reached him, and then they were furiously steel against steel. Straessa knew she was better, but her bones and muscles were protesting the treatment with each blow, whilst the Imperial Beetle was desperate, strong and good enough to keep her at bay despite her longer blade. She tried three times to pierce through his guard, even going as far as her old trick shoulder thrust, which hurt a lot more than it had last time. She managed to pink him in the shoulder, a bare half-inch of blade, but she nearly got his own sword in her face in return, and then he tried to lunge past her point so as to grapple with her.

  She got her sword into his thigh, but there it stuck, and his greater weight bowled her over, and then she was struggling with him for his own sword, as he raised it over her like a long dagger, trying to drive it down past the rim of her breastplate.

  We’re in the middle of my own cursed army! Why is nobody helping me? She tried to draw breath to cry out, but she was losing ground inch by inch, and she felt that the attempted yell might see that blade plunge straight through her. His face was so close to hers that she could see the veins about the edges of his bulging eyes as he fought to kill her.

  She slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose. Or that had been the idea. In fact she slammed her forehead into his hard cheekbone, dazing herself, but he started back, losing force on the blade so that, when she pushed, she toppled him off her. With a cry, he went for her again before she could struggle upright, and an arrow skewered him almost ear to ear, leaving him sitting back on his haunches, transfixed head tilted philosophically at the sky.

  ‘Took your time,’ Straessa hissed, taking Gorenn’s hand and letting the Dragonfly do most of the work of pulling her up.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me yelling at you to give me a clear shot?’

  Straessa blinked at her. ‘No . . . no, I didn’t. Look, go and round up a bunch of ours, get them to go check down all the carriages for other sods like this one, or for explosives, right? I reckon that’s going to be our best contribution for now.’

  Gorenn nodded briskly, flared her wings and was away.

  There were two more saboteurs caught and killed, and a dozen set explosives to disarm, but the Collegiate artificers were up to it. The Empire’s gambit had failed, on that front.

  The carriage that had actually taken a leadshot hit was irreparable, and the entire army lost a day’s progress while the combined might of its artificers got the other cars back on the rails and ready to travel.

  Two hundred and four Collegiates and twenty-three others had died in the attack. The work on the carriages gave their comrades time to bury them, and to mourn.

  Thirty-Eight

  There was one corner of the world left where Totho could think.

  He was packed int
o this cave with the slaves, jostling shoulder to shoulder in the lightless, airless press of them. He had fought with his blade until it had been ripped from his hand. He had fought on with his gauntleted hands, but they had dragged him down. When they could not kill him, battering at his mail with their crudely forged swords, they had dragged him to their sightless city and thrown him down here with the others, those wretches who had been caught but not yet killed. The only way out was the same shaft that he had been dropped down.

  Nobody was fed. Nobody was given water. Several had died already.

  Totho had allowed himself to be buffeted back and forth, sometimes almost falling over save that the constant sway of bodies kept him upright, until he had found this corner, this last black outpost of understanding. A nook at the far back of the cave, as far from everything else as he could ever get.

  The Worm’s deadening influence did not quite stretch there, as though it was so deep into the rock that it was thrust into some other place where sanity still reigned, and Totho could crouch there with his armour scraping against the walls, fending off the moaning, weeping mass of composite humanity, and think Apt thoughts.

  Only wedged there into that corner did he have options. They had not taken his mail, so they had not taken his weapons. He had one last trick, if only he had the final courage to use it. His belt of grenades remained, and it had been easy enough to feed a single pull-cord through them all. One bold wrench and the privations of this place would be gone. He would not have to worry about them any more. He guessed that the blast would kill just about everyone else here, too. It would only be a shame that his captors would not die as well, though perhaps the contained force might crack the rock, tumble down some part of their domain into the pit that his explosives would create.

  He thought about it further. Over and over, he thought about it, but he did nothing.

  Where are you, Che? He had been so sure that he would find her, but he was a prisoner, and she was not here beside him. She was dead, perhaps. Or she was free.

  If he had known what the Worm would do to his mind, he would never have come down here. With his Aptitude intact he felt that the world was his to face and to master. But here . . . crammed into his tiny space, throat and nostrils choked with the sweat and excrement and fear of all those doomed souls, all his Aptitude could give him was a way to die.

  And he knew, horribly, that if he took one step forwards, even that would be gone from him. He would have nothing.

  His thumb found the cord, hooked into the metal ring there, tensioned it. He had linked the triggers to all the grenades: the simple mechanical exercise had been almost calming. Just one solid pull.

  It was safe to say, he reckoned, that this was not what he had been looking for in coming down here. But, in all honesty, after Drephos died he had become unmoored in the world. Che had been the only landmark left for him to steer by, but what a treacherous course that had proved to be. She had never been any good for him.

  He looked up, eyes wide against the darkness, and spotted the light. It was merely a faint, pallid luminescence, but it was light. A few of the slaves appeared to have seen it too – he could make out the odd face turned upwards, the dim radiance touching them fleetingly. The rest seemed blind to it, as though it did not exist for them.

  But then he remembered Drephos – who had possessed eyes like a Moth’s – telling him how his vision had adjusted to darkness, leaching the colours from things, but sharpening the shapes, seeing the world in greys by some medium that owed nothing to light itself – the dark-adapted eye saw no light or radiance, torches and lanterns did not betray their owners to it.

  Someone up there had a light, and Totho knew that it could not be any of his captors.

  He lurched forwards, feeling doors slam shut in his mind, but in that moment not caring, shouldering his way into the human morass, fighting through it as though it were quicksand, shoving and kneeing and striking his way through the whimpering, unresisting throng.

  ‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘I’m here!’ as though the glow was for him, as though it could possibly be for him.

  He saw a man there, crouching almost upside down at the mouth of the shaft, held there by the Art of both feet and one hand, with a kind of lantern held out into space – little more than some burning embers in a metal cage.

  Some of the other slaves around him were staring mutely, although many were just ignoring everything, eyes empty as wells, denying what they heard and anything they might see.

  ‘Tell me you’re Totho,’ the lamp-bearer said. He was an odd sort of man, of no kinden Totho could immediately identify.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered.

  ‘Cheerwell Maker sent me.’ The stranger peered down, studying the dense mass of bodies below.

  ‘Get me out.’

  ‘I . . .’ The man glanced up the shaft. ‘I’m not sure that I can. Up above the city’s crawling with them. They’d see you the moment you got out of here. I need to think. Now I’ve found you, I need to think.’

  ‘They come here,’ Totho said. ‘The creatures that rule here, they come and take people. I’ve not been here long and I’ve seen more than a dozen go already. They just climb down and seize on victims at random.’ There was a moaning starting up, amongst the slaves, as though even speaking those words might incur the next visitation. ‘They can climb well – even on the ceiling. They get everywhere. How much thinking time do you need?’

  ‘I really don’t know if I can get you out. I’m sorry,’ the lamp-bearer admitted. ‘I promised Cheerwell I’d try, though.’

  ‘Can you come down here?’ Totho heard his own voice shaking. The dreadful sound the other slaves were making was swelling in a wordless, inhuman chorus of fear, of people who had been robbed of everything, their hope last of all. ‘I need . . . I need . . . Please, there is something I need to tell you, to show you. If it comes to the worst. Please.’

  The stranger ducked his head back, and for a moment Totho thought he would just go, abandoning all attempt at a rescue. Then he was back, and his Art seemed to be almost as strong as the bodies of the Worm, because he crouched flat against the ceiling, creeping in jerky, awkward motions, following as Totho pushed and cuffed his way back towards his corner, hunting for it with the inner senses of his mind that told him when he was reaching that tiny pocket where the world again made sense. Where he could explain.

  He looked up, and started away from the man’s upside-down face. The dirge of the slaves was rising into a full wail, and they were pushing and fighting not to be directly beneath the shaft.

  ‘The Worm’s heard that racket,’ the lamp-bearer guessed. He made no move to put the light out. Apparently he had come to the same conclusion as Totho about the limits of the Worm’s sight.

  ‘Or they were just coming anyway,’ Totho replied. ‘To do . . . to take us . . . wherever they do.’

  ‘Oh, I know where they’re taking their captives,’ the stranger hissed. ‘The Worm and its warriors, they don’t care. They don’t have any use for live prisoners. Up above, there are some scarred old men, though, some filthy, cowardly creatures who live in the Worm’s shadow. And the Worm is their god, and they give it offerings because they hope it will spare them. But it won’t. And neither will I.’ The quiet venom in his words was startling.

  Now Totho saw the shadows as the Worm’s creatures crept out, clinging to the sheer stone and staring downwards, here at the behest of the stranger’s ‘scarred old men’, apparently. Sacrificed to a god, though? Is he serious? What does he mean?

  ‘Stranger,’ he hissed.

  ‘Esmail,’ the man told him.

  ‘Esmail, then. You’re Apt?’

  The man looked at him, baffled. ‘No. Not that it matters. If I were anywhere else you’d call me a magician, perhaps, but that means nothing here. I’m living on pure skill and self-mutilation.’ This close, Totho could hear a quaver in the man’s words that matched his own hollow fear.

  ‘There’s something . . .
’ He was watching the warriors of the Worm pick their way overhead. Every so often one would strike down, snagging a slave, and then half a dozen would converge to draw the struggling, shrieking individual up between them, whilst the rest of the host remained silent now, not wanting to draw attention, not wanting to be the next chosen. ‘If they come for me . . . there’s something I need you to do. An Apt thing.’

  ‘Well, that makes two reasons why I can’t do it,’ Esmail hissed.

  Totho told him anyway. He explained it as simply as possible. He said nothing about mechanical principles or about the chemistry of the efficient little explosives. He focused on the simple physical action required. It’s as simple as pulling on a string.

  ‘Then you do it.’

  Totho shook his head urgently. ‘You don’t understand. You can’t. One step . . . one step forwards and I lose it. I can’t . . . I won’t be able to . . .’

  Then the creatures of the Worm were retreating, taking their chosen sacrifices with them, and Esmail was backing off.

  ‘Forget all that,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll get a rope. I’ll find some way out, if there’s a way to be found.’ Then he was carefully making his way back across the ceiling, one limb at a time, teeth gritted with the effort, following in the trail of the Worm.

  There was no forced marching of the slaves of the Worm. Many were injured or ill, or simply weak from hunger. Some – the lucky few – had children to slow them down. The great mass of them crawled across the barren and bleak terrain, torches and lanterns scattered randomly amongst them. They were making the best time they could, but it was painfully slow. Originally, Che had been using whatever Moth-kinden were willing to act as her eyes, spying out the ground ahead and to either side, wary of the approach of the Worm. That had not turned out well. The great mass of movement, the constant comings and goings in the air, had attracted the attention of the monsters they knew as the White Death, and several Moths had been snatched in mid-flight. Now Che was having to rely on scouts on the ground – anyone with good enough eyes for the pitch dark and who could run fast. Still most of her volunteers were Moths; it seemed almost surreal that their people – so isolated and haughty up above – were some of her most willing helpers here.