Seal of the Worm Read online

  ‘How can anything live here?’ she asked hollowly.

  ‘There’s plenty.’ Maure’s voice still sounded shaky. ‘There’s stuff . . . lichen-looking stuff over a lot of the rocks, and wherever there’s water there are fungi. And things eat the fungi and the lichen, and other things eat them, just as you’d expect. Crickets – there are a lot of crickets. That’s what we just ate. Messel brought one down for us.’

  The idea of eating cricket meat seemed such a normal and domestic thing that Che almost laughed.

  Her Art had limits, but she strained her eyes, seeing something out there that looked more complex, more artificial. There was a chasm, and she thought there was a river, but beyond it, set into the rising cliffs of the far bank . . .

  ‘Is that a town?’

  ‘Cold Well,’ said a low, resonant voice, and they both started from a shrouded figure crouching motionless nearby, which even Che’s eyes had missed.

  For a second Che was reaching for magic that remained stubbornly absent, seeking a defence, a weapon, but then Maure announced, ‘Messel.’

  He was draped in cloth, cloaked with it, then a long, hooded tunic and trousers beneath, all cut into a heavy and unfamiliar style, the fabric woven from thick grey-mottled fibres. Seeking his face under the cowl, she tried to meet his eyes and failed.

  His skin was dead white, save where it was thinnest – where the faint shadows of veins and bones showed through. He was small, surely no taller than she, and thin to the point of starvation. His face was taut over a skull whose contours she could trace, and his long, delicate hands were lessons in anatomy. He had no eyes at all, not even sockets, just a wrinkled expanse of translucent skin from hairline down to his beak of a nose.

  ‘Cold Well,’ he said again. ‘I was born there.’ The voice buzzed within his chest, sounding as though it was meant for a far larger man than this fragile creature.

  ‘A slave?’

  ‘There are only slaves and the Worm.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘And now you.’

  ‘Messel,’ Che spoke his name. He was not coming closer, crouched against the stone with that sightless visage cocked upwards, drawing in his understanding of the world through sound and smell and who knew what hidden Art besides. When she took a step towards him, he scuttled back exactly the same distance, his feet sure on the uneven rocks, silent in motion, then remaining still to the point of invisibility, no matter how good her eyes were.

  ‘Are you . . . the Worm?’ She had meant to say ‘of the Worm’ but the way the words came out seemed more fitting.

  He shook his head, his blind attention plumbing unseen vistas. ‘Messel,’ he said in that rich voice. ‘Messel the hunted. Messel who would not work. Messel the kinless, the cursed.’

  ‘And you are of this Cold Well.’

  ‘Once.’

  Che let her Art lapse, so that the darkness rushed back on her like a tide, obliterating all she saw of the land beyond. She had the measure of her own sight, though, and after a while her eyes adjusted, and she could see a faint suggestion of light from what Messel had just named Cold Well. Even the prisoners of this tomb felt the chill: there was a scatter of fire over there, though what it was they burned in this place she could not guess.

  She turned her face upwards and then clutched abruptly at Maure’s arm. ‘There are stars! The sky . . . we can just fly out?’

  A long pause from the other two, and then Maure’s subdued response: ‘They’re not stars.’

  ‘They dwell above. Their lights lure the unwary who tread the air above us, insects, men too. All who are drawn to the lights are devoured,’ Messel intoned softly. ‘Those that tell the story that says we were not always here, that we came here from another place, a place of light – not my kinden, but I have heard the tale – they say that the ceiling-dwellers were placed there so that none could even search for a way back out. For me, I never believed in such things.’ And of course, whether he tilted his head towards the distant ceiling or towards the night sky itself, he would see no stars.

  Che felt a hand clasp her arm, and then Maure was leaning into her, trembling slightly. ‘There are no dead here, Che,’ she whispered. ‘No loose spirits, no pieces of the slain. They all go. They all go to the Worm.’

  Che shuddered, and for a long time she just sat there, a comforting arm about the halfbreed magician, staring up into that closed and hungry sky.

  Two

  ‘It’s getting to the point where we’re either going to have to risk Imperial displeasure by kicking them out, or arrange for an accident,’ Totho commented.

  ‘You think our guests are outstaying their welcome?’ Drephos’s tone was dry, amused. ‘Unfortunately, the Empire remains a source of patronage, even if we are looking further afield for trading partners these days. If that means we must deal with Consortium spies pretending to be merchants, then so be it. Turning them away is not yet an option.’

  Colonel-Auxillian Drephos, master artificer of the weapons trade, dwelt in no palace or great hall, nor even in a well-appointed townhouse such as the Solarnese might favour. His rooms were small, uncluttered and poorly lit. A moderately successful merchant’s factor would turn his nose up at them. He lived mostly in his workshops, though. He slept only a handful of hours a night, if that, and could see perfectly in the dark. It was a familiar occurrence for Totho to enter the workshops and find his master working through the small hours, surrounded by fragments of clockwork and oblivious to the passage of time.

  Of course Totho worked at odd hours too, whenever inspiration struck. The only difference was that he had to bring a lamp with him.

  ‘Well, if we can’t officially show our displeasure, what if one of them got his prying hands caught? Poking around in someone else’s work can be a dangerous business if you don’t understand the principles involved.’

  Around them, the machines stood silent, ready to stamp, press, mould and cut. Schematics for half a dozen inventions-in-progress were tacked up on boards all around them. Both of them had particular projects that they were devoting their time to, but the ideas would keep coming nonetheless, to be hastily scribed down for later use.

  ‘If it would make you happy,’ Drephos replied indulgently. ‘I admit, they have been growing somewhat insistent recently.’

  The factories of the Iron Glove in Chasme lay just across the Exalsee from Solarno, seat of the nearest Imperial presence. That sea, and half of that city, was firmly in the hands of the Spiderlands Aristoi, and yet the Empire’s mercantile Consortium still paid its visits. The Glove had not been free of them for months now. Oh, they brought sacks of money, new commissions and orders, but they also had other agendas. At least half of those supposed diplomats and artificers and traders who walked in under the Black and Gold took considerable liberties with a guest’s access to the premises. They were hunting for secrets, and no doubt seized greedily on any scraps of thought that Totho and Drephos left lying around.

  More recently, though – ever since the Glove’s two founding members had paid a visit to Capitas – they had been aware that the Consortium, and through it the Empire itself, had something specific in mind.

  It did not exist, Drephos had assured them. The complex alchemical formula they asked after had been lost in the confusion of the last war’s end. Drephos himself had come out of that war as both a deserter and an invalid. Small surprise, then, if some of his secrets had fallen from the fingers of his broken metal hand, which Totho had since repaired.

  And of course they then asked if he could recreate the substance, and he had confirmed he could not. The poison they called the Bee-killer had been the work of two protégés of his who had taken their own lives when it became evident what the Empire wanted their work for. Drephos himself was not a good enough chemical engineer to follow in their footsteps. He preferred working with metal, after all.

  At which the Consortium men nodded and muttered and shrugged – and in their hearts they did not believe him.

  The latest pack of t
hem had been due to depart a few days ago, but had now stretched their welcome to breaking point, and every night one or other of them had been spotted creeping about the corridors of the workshop, hunting for the supposed secret. And it was certainly there, Totho knew full well. Of course Drephos had the formula for the Bee-killer, the city-devouring poison gas that Totho himself had unleashed on the Imperial garrison at Szar. After all, Drephos’s business – his obsession – was with tools of destruction. He had no other reason to exist.

  And yet the Consortium asked and asked again, and Drephos put them off.

  Totho remembered a conversation with his master, looking out over the city of Szar. It had been the night before the Bee-killer – unnamed at that time – was to be unleashed on the rebels there: a grand statement of the Empire’s ruthless use of power, a lesson to all others who dared to rise up. Drephos had argued that the lethal gas was simply the continuation of war, inevitable and even desirable, the furtherance of his craft. Totho had been half convinced. Circumstances had forced his hand, though. They had fought, the two artificers, and Totho had won the fight but lost the argument. He had tested the weapon anyway, on the Wasps themselves. That final show of dedication to his trade, Totho suspected, had healed the rift between him and Drephos as if it had never been. The Colonel-Auxillian was a man to whom moral principles were a closed book, but that cut every way – it made no difference to him who the Bee-killer killed, so long as it worked.

  Totho longed to ask him now: Why have you not given it to them? He had been ready to resist it, too, to try all those tools of persuasion that had failed to open Drephos’s heart or mind the first time.

  Now he wondered if his arguments had somehow found a purchase on the man, after all, for the Bee-killer formula stayed locked away, and Drephos brushed the Consortium men off with lies.

  Whenever they spoke to Imperial delegations, everyone cheerily agreed that the Empire needed them, and they needed the Empire, but Totho was wondering how much that held true nowadays. The Glove was expanding into other markets now that its reputation was established. The Empire’s own Engineers were growing pointedly envious that a pack of mercenaries was outmatching them in the eyes of their superiors. Closest to home, the Glove’s guests were becoming visibly frustrated at the denials and evasions, and of course there were plenty who remembered how Drephos had deserted the Empire in its time of need, subsequent pardon or not. It was not as if he did not have enemies.

  Totho set to making plans, therefore. The matter in hand, of their unwelcome guests, was almost a pleasant diversion, practically an apprentice piece compared to his usual stock in trade. So it was that, a day later, one of the visiting Wasps was found – far beyond anywhere he had any right to be – caught in the jaws of a steam-press, the mangled pieces of his body imprinted with the hard lines of components as though he was posthumously confessing his spying.

  The delegation left that day, uneasily accepting Drephos’s wry condolences, but inevitably they would be back.

  The Solarno that the Imperial delegation returned to was a city under the hammer, day to day, and yet for all that its shadow spoiled the clear blue skies above, the blow refused to fall.

  There were a thousand rumours. After half a tenday, Lieutenant Gannic had heard them all.

  This was where the Empire and the Spiderlands had signed their great accord, their declaration of common interests. From Solarno’s gates a combined force had marched out in the direction of Collegium, snapping up every little prize on the way: Tark, Kes, Merro, Egel – Spider satrapies all. The Empire had grander plans: the Beetle city itself.

  And they had taken it, Spiders and Wasps together; the great heart of the Lowlands had been stilled. And then, on the back of that victory and before the populace had even been decently pacified, the victors had fallen out. Nobody knew the details – there were a thousand rumours about that as well – but now there were Imperial forces along the Silk Road, and Seldis had fallen to the Black and Gold, and thousands of Spiderlands mercenaries and Satrapy soldiers were on the move.

  Solarno sat, jewel of the Exalsee, with its northern districts patrolled by the servants of the Empress and its docklands held by the lackeys of the Aristoi, and a handful of streets in the middle that both sides conscientiously avoided. And . . . and what? And nothing.

  In a gloomy backroom behind a machine shop in the lower reaches of the city was a one-eyed Fly-kinden who saw a great deal of what went on. She was a tough, leather-skinned woman with her greying hair cut short, whose past had seen her cross the Exalsee countless times on less than legitimate business, and who had made enough contacts and learned enough valuable secrets to set herself up as a freelance intelligencer.

  Gannic sat opposite her on the floor in the Fly style, even though it turned him into a hulking bundle of jutting knees and elbows. He guessed she insisted on seeing her larger visitors like this because she herself could be up and away before they could lever themselves to their feet.

  Won’t save her from stingshot, of course; but Gannic was a patient man, and he watched the diminutive woman sip her wine meditatively. Every so often her single eye flicked towards him, perhaps wondering who his paymasters were. There were so many to choose from these days.

  ‘I’ve done some digging for you,’ she remarked. ‘You ask some interesting questions, for a halfbreed just blown in out of the desert.’

  ‘Enquiring mind,’ Gannic told her. He was dressed like a tramp artificer, one of the many who trekked around the Exalsee whoring out their skills wherever the coin was. ‘What did you dig up?’

  ‘That a body went into the bay a tenday before you turned up. My friends in the business tell me the deceased looked a lot like your Wasp friend . . . and yes, there’s a strong suggestion that the corpse was collected from the governor’s townhouse, rather than someone stopping the man arriving there in the first place.’

  Gannic nodded. ‘And the other business?’

  ‘And the other money?’

  He regarded her for a moment, knowing that there was no trust in this espionage trade. She could be about to have him killed. She could not know that he was not going to try the same.

  He opened a purse and counted out coins – a mix of Imperial and Helleren mint – and then a coil of the gold wire the Spiders tended to travel with. She let the money sit on the table between them, her eye assessing the value. It was more than they had agreed, but Gannic had studied Solarnese etiquette regarding this sort of deal. Holding back information was par for the course, unless the buyer showed good form by being generous.

  ‘The governor, Edvic, absolutely does not deal with the Spider-kinden,’ she told him, with a regretful show of spread hands. ‘After all, there’s a war on.’ But she was smiling, and he had paid over the odds, so he waited until she added, ‘But.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But Edvic’s wife has a very busy life amongst Solarnese society. Her name is Merva, and she meets everyone. Many of those she meets frequent the lower streets, near the water.’ Meaning those parts controlled by the Spider-kinden.

  ‘Merva, you say?’

  The Fly smiled. ‘No doubt the Wasps would be horrified at the notion, but elsewhere, where we women are more valued, they say she runs the city, and that her husband just sits back and lets her get on with it. Such wisdom is rare in a man.’

  He nodded, and listened further as she gave him a concise list of people whom this Merva had spoken to, and the places she had visited. At the end, and again because he knew the etiquette, he slipped another couple of coins onto the table as he stood to leave.

  She made a satisfied grunt. ‘Enjoy your stay in our city, foreigner. I apologize for the weather.’

  Before leaving the machine shop, he considered that remark. Solarno at this time of year was famous for its clement climate. However, the unwary might find worse than rain dropping on them. The woman had probably set him up, and was now telling him that she’d done it – the curious honour of a Spiderlands
information broker.

  He broke away from the shop quickly, hearing the ambush start into motion. Instead of simply fleeing, he was turning to meet them, hands already out. He caught a glimpse of a couple of Solarnese dropping down from the rafters, and a Spider-kinden behind them, a lean, pale man with a rapier. The pair of thugs had cudgels only – so either they were amateurs or they wanted him alive.

  Either way, Gannic had no intention of obliging them. In one hand he had a sleevebow, one of those little cut-down snapbows that were slowly becoming the agent’s favourite friend, and he discharged it straight into the chest of the nearest bruiser, stopping him in his tracks and dropping him. The other man went for him, but Gannic skipped back, seeing the Spider descend hurriedly to join the fun.

  Gannic’s off hand spat golden fire, the Wasp’s Art, making them both duck back. For a moment he considered taking the fight to them, perhaps getting a few more questions in this night. As neither of them looked like a flier, trusting to his feet seemed the wiser move. Once he had got them to take cover, he was off and running, reloading the sleevebow as he went.

  Gannic had come here for a very specific mission, so the current state of Solarno should only have been of incidental interest to him. The officer overseeing this operation had hinted at some fairly expansive fallback options, though, and to utilize them he needed to work out the true story. The situation here might serve him, if only he could master it.

  Once he was sure he had thrown off any pursuers, he followed a roundabout and careful route back up to the Imperial half of the city, seeking out a Consortium factorum, where a man was waiting to hear his report. Despite the trappings, this operation was not being run by the Empire’s mercantile arm, and nor was it a job for their secret service, the Rekef – just as Gannic was a capable agent but also something more: a true specialist.