Tynisa lurched towards her, just as the crackling bolt of gold fire scorched down her leg. The rapier – leaden in her grip now that the Weaponsmaster’s bond had been severed – lanced the Empress’s calf, toppling her backwards. This time, Seda’s scream was pure pain.
Then Tynisa’s agony made its measured retreat once more – though barely far at all now – and she rolled onto her back bringing her blade up, trusting that it would seek out Tisamon’s attack.
He stood directly over her, right arm drawn back to administer the blow, left hand extended forwards to slap her blade aside. But his head was cocked as though he was listening.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Seda demanded. ‘Kill her! I command it!’ Again she thrust her arm out towards Tynisa, fighting furiously against all Che’s efforts to stop her.
Tynisa inched out from under Tisamon’s shadow, waiting for him to move, wondering if she now even had the strength to make a strike at him that would have any chance of piercing his guard and his armour.
Then he stepped back, in a single neat little motion, and lowered his blade. It was a movement almost unbearably familiar to her from all those practice bouts. Tisamon had concluded his lesson.
As she watched – as they all watched – he reached up and pulled off the helm. Beneath, his face was pallid and bluish, but still
him
. Whatever those pale eyes looked out on, though, was not his daughter or any other thing in that buried world.
His lips moved slightly, though no words came out.
‘Kill them!’ Seda yelled at him desperately, and his eyes focused, seeing not the Empress, but Tynisa.
He smiled slightly – in benediction? Who could say? Then he turned to go, and was nothing but a fragmenting pattern of shadows, gone as if he had never been.
Seda let out a scream of anguish, of lost control, and Tynisa forced herself onto one knee, trying to get her legs beneath her before the Worm regained the initiative and destroyed her with that pain. She locked eyes with the Empress, and spotted the very moment that the raging Wasp woman cast off the shackles Che had been trying to lay on her.
The stingshot punched solidly beneath Tynisa’s ribs and slammed her back to the ground.
Thalric partly crawled, partly ran and was mostly hauled on by Messel, pushing through the panicking, milling non-combatants, catching fleeting, clashing moments of what was going on ahead. Che simply stood there, seemingly doing nothing, and Thalric could not follow the duel between Tynisa and her father at all, save that every time he saw her, Tynisa seemed weaker and weaker, whilst the armoured behemoth that was Tisamon never changed.
And then for a moment, just as he and Messel broke free from the crowd and lurched out onto that shrinking patch of clear ground that the refugees had given Che, he saw Tisamon leave for good. No uncertainty there: not just dancing in and out of sight as he had before. The man turned, and the light of some other place and time played across his face, and something seemed to drop away from him – no, something returned to him, some innate part of Tisamon that even Thalric could tell had been lacking.
And he was gone, and Tynisa was levering herself up.
Thalric saw Seda kill her.
Che was shrieking her sister’s name, and Thalric saw the Empress’s uninjured hand turn towards her.
Now or never
, he thought and, shouting his body’s objections down, he called up his wings no matter how badly it hurt, and hurled himself like a missile, to knock Che clear.
The stingshot struck him in the chest, but he had his Commonweal mail on, which scattered the fire away so that he felt only a solid impact. Then he was up, with Che squirming out from beneath him, and his own hand was directed straight at his Empress. His shoulder was a festering knot of raw pain and the whole miserable underground world was wheeling about him, fit to make him sick.
But I’ve had worse
, he knew.
Ask all the bastards who’ve tried to kill me if I’ve not had worse.
He looked into the face of Seda and spat, ‘Die.’
‘No,’ she said. Her smile was manic, too wide, unhinged. ‘You are mine, Thalric, and you cannot kill me.’
And she was right. Looking into her face, that beautiful, delicate face, he fought to send his Art against her, and could not. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and he had shared her bed, and if she could not win him to her cause, she could still master him enough to be safe from him forever.
Then something punched into her leg, close to where Tynisa had stabbed her, and Seda dropped to the ground with a hoarse yell of incredulous pain. Her hands spat fire – a searing bolt clipped his shoulder and sent him skidding away from Che. A second stingshot burst near Messel, driving him back even as he was reaching for another sling stone.
Messel.
Thalric already had the plan in mind as he saw the man. The eyeless cave-kinden was an unlikely saviour, but he had one advantage over the rest of them.
Thalric threw himself forwards – yet another jolt of bone-jarring pain, but who was counting? – and spun himself about with a jagged flourish of his wings so that he ended up feet first in Che’s fire.
Three quick kicks was all it took to rain its burning pieces down on to the cowering slaves below, and plunge them all into unrelieved blackness.
He heard Seda’s voice lifted in terrible fear of that all-consuming dark, and then her sting was flashing, lighting brief slices of the underworld and looking for enemies. Thalric only hoped that Messel was bold enough to stand up and take a shot. He himself was too busy dragging himself downslope for the little cover that might grant him.
And please, Che, be smart enough to do the same!
She was not.
He saw none of it, only that one moment Seda was lashing about herself in a frenzy of stingshot, and the next moment the Empress of the Wasps keened out a last hideous sound . . . and then there was neither Art nor answer from her.
The battle below surged on, and Thalric could hear it getting closer. Then people were stepping on him, and he clawed his way back upslope, calling out Che’s name.
‘Here.’ He heard her, and because he had to see, because he had to know, he loosed a handful of stingshots up into the air, piecing the scene together from the after-image left by those flashes.
There was Che, cradling Tynisa’s still form, her shortsword dark with blood. Beyond her, sprawled like a toy, lay the corpse of the last scion of the Imperial line, Seda the First.
Thalric crawled over to her, groping blindly until Che took his hand.
‘I forgot you could see in the dark,’ he got out.
‘It’s just about all I still have,’ she told him, pulling him close.
‘Tell me what the battle looks like,’ he asked.
After a moment’s pause, she said, ‘It doesn’t look like a battle any more.’
He stared blindly out into the darkness that held the end of them both, now, and everything else besides. ‘Ah . . . Well, then, I have a few complaints about the way this whole business has been handled. When should I take them up with you?’
She was holding him very tightly and trembling now, whether for dead Tynisa or for what she could see before her. ‘Can it wait for tomorrow?’
‘Surely.’ With his next ragged breath he let go of something he had been holding on to for a long time. It might have been hope. ‘Che?’
Her lips found his.
The Worm carved its way closer, filling the sightless black with the screams of its victims.
Totho stared up into the face of god.
He stared at the night-black silhouette of that vast pronged head, seeing its antennae scour the edges of the cavern. It chewed over its current victim, mouthparts rending and tearing that ragged fragment of humanity between them with unthinking, destructive hunger until the face-swarming pitch of it had overwritten it all, all that its victim had been, now simply absorbed to become one more tormented visage floating on the surface of the void.
There seemed to be a lot of room in his mind for thought. Normally Totho’s brain was clogged with Aptitude, but now it had been hollowed out, all thoughts of importance were crushed by the weight of this . . . this thing before him.
A writhing wound at the world’s heart. Almost blind, mindless, ignorant, and so much the very centre of its expanding kingdom that it could abide nothing but its own ignorance. And it was an ignorance that it forced on all those in its presence; that it sent out along with its human puppets, for them to carry to the ends of the earth. He had witnessed this monster’s servitors venturing out into the world he knew. The blind man Messel had told him that the Worm was moving out from its lair into the wider world.
He could not now grasp the delicate thoughts of an artificer, but he could understand that here before him was the death of all Aptitude – and of magic too, if magic actually existed – the cessation of human thought, a despot of conformity and blinkered tyranny that could not brook anything challenging its monotonous, meaningless world.
One of the priests reached out for him, and Totho casually backhanded him, smashing his gauntlet into the man’s scar-ravaged face. The warriors closed in, swords levelled, and he let a couple of them strike at him, watching the blades scrape off his mail, before he just pushed his way through them.
He looked up again at that eye-twisting divinity that had robbed him of everything he had believed in. Its reach was finite, though, for it could not rob him of the things he had never believed. Staring up at the fathomless dark of its substance, he knew it could not be what it seemed. There was no magic, and the world ran by firm rules – even if he could not bring them to mind any more.
He continued studying the segmented shape that towered over him, looking past all the boiling darkness that seethed out of it, taking in the rippling legs, the hooked fangs. He held firm to his long-nurtured loathing of the supernatural, his deep-ingrained faith in a mechanistic universe, and his eyes pierced the veil that cloaked the god of the Worm. Strip it to its base shape, and there was nothing remarkable about it but its size.
It’s nothing but a big centipede.
‘Is this it?’ he demanded, his voice ringing unnaturally loud throughout the cave. ‘This is your master? I challenge it! I set my armour against it.’ He rounded on the aghast priests. ‘I cannot tell you how this metal was made, but now that it is made, it goes on working. You cannot deny it. You cannot dent it with your stupidity. It is not subject to your belief.’ He saw their baffled expressions. They could not understand what he meant.
He stepped forwards, and the slight shift in the monstrous centipede’s swaying motion showed that it was aware of him.
He looked over at Esmail, seeing the man creeping closer.
There’s a time for subtlety. This is not it.
The priests were crowding him now, shoving him forwards towards the lip of that chasm. He let them. One hand drifted towards his belt. There was something very important about his belt. He knew it, he knew it, and yet he could not quite understand it. Something was there, and had there not been a plan . . .?
Then Esmail was amongst the warriors of the Worm, shouting for Totho to get clear. His hands carved them apart, shearing through flesh and armour, dropping three in that first surprise rush. The others turned to fight him, swift and relentless, and he led them about the enclosed confines of the cave, cutting their swords in two with bare-handed parries, or darting in beneath their blows to hack at their bodies. He was outmatched swiftly, but he never let them catch him.
‘Go!’ he was shouting to Totho. ‘Run!’
At the same time, someone barrelled into the priests, striking out at them with a staff. It looked just like one of their own, and Totho could make nothing of that – the intruder seemed almost berserk, though, smashing randomly around and scattering them, freeing Totho up for a moment. Perhaps he, too, expected Totho just to run.
Totho’s thumb found the string at his belt. He could not remember what it was for, only that it was important.
He remembered his conversation with Esmail, back in the prison.
It’s as simple as pulling on a string.
Why had he said that? What would that accomplish? He could no longer remember. Pulling on a string did sound simple, though. One hardly needed to be Apt for that, surely?
His hand was on that string, just one pull required, and yet he could not do it. The necessary link between impulse and action had been broken. He was betrayed by his own Aptitude, which had guided everything he had ever done. Now that its crutch was gone, such a simple move was beyond him.
That vast head struck down, blotting out his entire world, but it seemed confused by the struggling melee before it, instead hammering at the rock, smashing one of the priests into a pulp, then drawing back.
Esmail was coming back round, the warriors right on his heels. ‘Go! Go!’ he was shouting, but only because he did not understand how important all this was.
Not for Che, not for Collegium, not for freedom, but for artificers everywhere. This obscenity must go.
Then the Worm lunged again, and this time its hooked claws pincered his body and lifted him up.
The mail held. For a few impossible seconds, the god of the Centipede-kinden strove against the metallurgy of the Iron Glove and could not break it, though Totho felt his cuirass twist and groan, felt the latching between breast- and backplate snap under the force. And still his hand was at his waist, paralysed by ignorance. The dark radiance that the Worm blazed with enveloped him, but he felt the solid physical clutch of its fangs, and knew he was right. The lord of the underworld, the god of sacrifice and slavery, was no more than a vast beast.
Then someone was clinging to him, and he looked down into Esmail’s stricken face as the other man brought the lantern down across the Worm’s head, flaming pieces shattering across its broad carapace, which burned for moments like flaming oil on water before the darkness began to conquer the flames.
In the guttering light of that fire, Totho locked eyes with Esmail and saw understanding there – at last
someone
who understood. And Esmail had never been Apt: those parts of his mind that this monster was stifling had nothing to do with the urgent instructions Totho had coached him with.