The sheer geography of this realm had begun to make his mind hurt. Che had spoken of the Worm’s city, and he had thought,
It must be just one of many, surely
. But no, there was just the one, from whence all the Worm sprang, and all roads led towards it. It was the centre of this prison world, and the Worm itself – the physical form the Centipede-kinden had given to it in their desperation – was the centre of that, ergo the centre of this entire world.
He could not imagine how it worked, how everything would have to curve and funnel in to make that true. Perhaps Che could, or some Moth Skryre with a far greater understanding of the world than poor Esmail.
The breaking of the Seal had sent slow shockwaves through the Worm’s domain, Esmail surmised. This had been a part of the larger world once, and it was trying to be so again. These caves and caverns, this lightless place of many kinden, had simply been another power in the old Inapt games of state, until the Worm’s practices – their aggression, their conversions, their taking of children and repurposing them for their own cause – had caused that great and almighty war of antiquity. Now the underearth was striving to return to its proper place, and Esmail could see cracks and damage, fallen buildings, entire shattered districts of the great stone city. But of course the Worm needed no buildings, no cities. The Worm had been born out of the Centipede ideal and from the depraved desperation of its people with one need only: that there should be the Worm, forever and forever. The Worm was the centre of its own world. The only things it permitted to exist were those that furthered the existence of the Worm. It needed slaves because they produced new life to become segments to graft on to its extended body; because they toiled and mined to arm and equip its mindless host of soldiers. For a long time that uneasy stasis had been maintained by the Scarred Ones, who had the human intellect the Worm lacked. They had preyed and preserved all at once, keeping a precarious balance of feast and famine.
The breach of the Seal had ended that. Now the Worm, which had been coiled in readiness for a thousand years, was striking upwards at that great mass of the sunlit world, not because it was some manner of birthright from before the war, but because it was different to the Worm. Because it was a world that the Worm was not the centre of.
That was the thought that obsessed Esmail, for what he had gleaned from the scarred woman’s mind had suggested that Che had underestimated how the Worm would conquer. Not merely casting the bristling loops of its body up into the wider world, but by warping that world’s very nature, simply by its presence. As its armies funnelled into the lands above, so the Worm would twist the very weave of the world around it, dragging at the centre until all the world, and not just this barren prison, led to its jaws. And by then the Worm would need no others, not soldiers, not priests, not slaves. There would be just the Worm.
Esmail had killed, in his time. He had served evil causes. He was well acquainted with the sort of motives that drove the Wasps to send out their armies or drove Moths to intrigue against one another. He understood evil. The horror of the Worm was that it was not evil. Evil implied a choice. The Worm was what it had been made to be, as innocently destructive as a machine.
The Scarred Ones, though . . . they were evil. He was happily killing any that he could creep up behind and cut open. They had been given the choice, and they had made it.
Here in their city he possessed no magic, but he remembered with a professional clarity just how a Scarred One’s mind had thought, and he remembered the Hermit’s reluctant blessing, and he had cut himself again into the exacting patterns of their mystery. He had taken every word of Che’s account and analysed it as a spy should, and now he walked amongst the bodies of the Worm and they did not notice him. Or, if he felt a ripple of unease run through them, he would add another scar to his flesh and quell their suspicions. He avoided the Scarred Ones themselves, who would know in an instant he was not one of them. It was hardly textbook fieldcraft, but it had kept him alive and undetected so far.
And he had seen it all. He had not realized that he came here only because Che’s story had seemed too bizarre to be believed, but now his eyes had been opened: it was true in every word.
Or every word but one. He had yet to see that final inner secret. He had yet to confront the Worm inside its den.
The child pits had nearly finished him. He had been a hard man once, but having children, loving children, had fractured some part of his inner armour. He had stared down at the terrified, lonely infants, seen them look up at him beseechingly as though he could do anything for them. He had come so close to trying to help, even though all he would have accomplished would have been to destroy his own cover.
He had looked in each subsequent pit, witnessing each group of children one step further removed from their roots, from their individuality. He had seen, stage by stage, the Worm consume everything that they had been, and leave nothing but its hollow casts behind.
It was after that that he had started murdering the Scarred Ones whenever they gave him the opportunity. He desperately wanted to kill somebody for it, and they were the only ones to whom it was even possible to attach blame. If it had been feasible to go backwards somehow and kill all their ancestors as well, all the great magicians of the Centipede-kinden when they had first thought up this madness, then he would have done that, too.
Not long ago he had made a surprise discovery: he had found out where the Scarred Ones lived. There was a nest of caves beneath the city, unconnected to the tunnels leading to their god. There the true remnants of the Centipede-kinden clung to their precarious existence, hiding and breeding like vermin, like parasites in their own places. He saw them there, and their children – already scarred to keep them from the wrath of the mindless host all around them. He could have stalked in and butchered them, but found that it was not in him, quite, to do so. Besides, they did not all sleep at once, but operated some kind of staggered rota, so that some were always vigilant. At first he imagined that they feared some intruder such as himself. Then he realized that they feared the end of their immunity, that their god would suddenly realize that it had no need for them. Such feeble sentries could not have kept that tide out, but still they watched. It was not quite enough to engender sympathy in him, but it came close.
He had no idea how Che’s own work was going – her attempts to gather and organize the slaves. He had been out of contact now for unknown days and uncounted moonless nights. All he knew was that there were prisoners being brought into the city on a regular basis, but no clue as to whether they were captured in battle or were just part of the Worm’s attempts to consume its human chattels here to fuel its assault on the world above.
That there were prisoners at all was because of the priests, he guessed. The Worm would have no use for living slaves to be brought to its city, any more than it had a use for the city itself. The priests, though, had concocted their insane, all-denying religion around it, and told themselves that their practices earned them its blessings, and their sacrifices protected them from its wrath. Esmail could see, with utter clarity, that there were no blessings and likewise no wrath.
The priests killed their prisoners fairly quickly. Many they killed themselves in lesser rites – and the bodies went to feed the Worm’s own growing mass, or to load the tables of the priests themselves. Far more were being taken down into the chamber that Che had spoken of – the true final point of all roads within this stone nightmare. The Worm was hungry.
He had been steeling himself to follow one such expedition. He needed to view his enemy with his own eyes before he brought this whole edifice down.
In the end, his hand was forced. He would never know if, unassisted, he might have possessed the courage to make that journey deeper into the earth.
He saw the latest band of prisoners brought in. Amongst them was a familiar face.
The big man stood in the centre of this ragged band of slaves, hands extended over them as though still trying to protect them in some way. Orothellin.
Esmail watched that huge, haggard figure even as the Scarred Ones came for him, weaving through the constantly busy throng of soldiers. The big man had mustered a certain dignity for the occasion, and Esmail badly wanted to make himself known in some way: to let Orothellin know that he was not alone in these last moments.
Then, of course, the soldiers were separating the giant out, for who was a better offering to the Worm than this man, this veteran of a thousand years and a symbol of their captivity?
They took him away, Orothellin moving slowly, almost as though he was still half asleep, with the people of the Worm milling around him like children.
The thought suddenly made Esmail sick. Of course, like children. They were all somebody’s children. Generations of children stolen and hollowed out and sent to tyrannize and kill their own kin.
And no wonder the ancient world had stood together against the Worm.
This time, he followed when they took Orothellin beneath the earth. This time, the Scarred Ones did not delay. There was a dreadful excitement about them.
They know who he is. They have been hunting him for a long time.
And it will buy you nothing from your god, save that the wretched man is perhaps a larger morsel than most.
He crept in their shadow using the skills of a long life in the trade – no magic, but his expertise had always counted more than mere magician’s tricks. There were many of them, and soldiers too – had there been fewer Esmail could have won Orothellin a moment’s freedom, for all that they were in the heart of the enemy’s domain. As it was, natural caution won out and he merely watched. What else, after all, was a spy for? Today he was a spy.
Tomorrow an assassin
, he fervently hoped.
They led him, all unknown, to the lair of their god, that same great rift that Che had described, and there the Worm came for Orothellin, and devoured him and his thousand years without thought or appreciation, and went away again.
Immediately afterwards, Esmail left the broken city and found himself some hidden nook in the stone to creep into, and he trembled and stared at his hands in the darkness.
He couldn’t do it. He saw that now. Even if the thing was not a god, then it was still too vast, too dark, too terrifying. He had no Art or skill or useless, useless magic that would permit him the hubris of attacking the Worm. His courage went only so far. It could not be done.
Thirty-Three
Everyone had questions, but Eujen had no answers, not real ones.
When are they coming back?
was the one he heard most often. So many citizens of Collegium had marched off with the Sarnesh, and people wanted to know when they would see their loved ones, their relatives, their business partners or drinking mates. Worse, there had been that airship which had escaped ahead of the Second Army’s retreat. Nobody had realized at the time just what had been going on – not even the general of the Second, apparently. Only after the dust had cleared did anyone realize that the Imperial Slave Corps had simply floated away with several hundred citizens.
Everyone was mourning someone: dead or missing or marched off with the army. Whole sections of the city were running short-handed. There weren’t enough hands to rebuild or to reorganize. Collegium was merely limping through the days.
When are they coming back?
people asked about the Merchant Companies. Eujen himself wanted to know that. What news he received from the troops showed that nobody there knew, either.
And there was that other trouble – the attacks under cover of darkness that scoured isolated farms and mills and villages and left no witnesses – or sometimes left a row of houses untenanted without warning or explanation. Everyone had somehow been assuming that it was some game of the Wasps, some pastime of Tynan’s Second, but the Wasps were gone, and it was getting worse, and so they came to Eujen and asked him what he intended to do about it.
He had not been appointed the leader of the city. There was no real Assembly. That sad rump that the Wasps had permitted to ‘advise’ had since been disbanded, and those who had sat on it were all doing their best to explain that, really, they had been given no choice, and of course they had worked against the Empire in so many, alas invisible, ways. At the same time, nobody was about to say they needed another governor to rule the city with a tyrant’s rod. Their intricate system of government had been taken apart, and nothing brought in to replace it.
Eujen, a student who could walk only through the intervention of artifice, had been the de facto Collegiate Speaker in exile in Sarn. Now he found that people were still looking to him for leadership, when there was so very little he could do.
So he did the little that he could. He found other people who themselves could only do a little. He got them together and talking to each other. He combined all those small contributions, building one on another until he had something that looked as though it would at least keep the wheels turning for now.
He started with his friends and associates, with a keen realization of,
So this is nepotism, then.
He found people who had been useful in Sarn, College Masters, his parents. He moved on to people they knew, for his parents had their mercantile contacts; scholars knew other scholars, who in turn knew someone who . . .
Eujen himself did nothing save point people at other people, and point people at problems, and he waited for someone to look at him and demand to know what gave him the right.
When the people he was pointing at each other had differences or came to blows, he intervened. To his lasting amazement, they listened to him bluster, nodding soberly. If he voiced a thought, that opinion of his seemed to manifest almost as a physical thing, with weight and impetus.