The Seal of the Worm (63 page)

‘They’ll throw something else in our way,’ she told him, ‘but we have a clean run to their column, the scouts say. If we move fast, they won’t have the time to set another blockade like this one.’ Her troops were marching off, double time, already scanning the skies for the next band of Airborne.

‘Come on, Maker!’ Rosander’s voice boomed nearby. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Nothing. I’ve waited long enough for this.’ Stenwold saw Kymene’s odd look and knew that she would not understand. Yes, this was her city, but he had seen it fall twenty years before, and he had not been present the last time the Mynans had fought free of their conquerors. This time it would be real for him. This time he would personally see Myna free, and perhaps lay to rest those decades-old memories.

He was not young, and he had plenty of old injuries to drag him back, but somehow he kept up the pace, though Paladrya had to steady him whenever he lost his footing on the rubble. On all sides the broken facades of Myna gazed at him hollowly, spurring him on with their mute reminders. Occasionally the snapbow bolts sang out – he saw men and women go down and get dragged into cover by their comrades, but they fell singly, and the Wasps could not slow the rest enough. He had the sense of the Empire’s brutal hold on this city disintegrating.

At one point he found himself struggling over another barricade, his feet slipping on the broken pieces of Mynan homes, but it was built lower than the last and the Empire had not stayed to defend it. The liberators were driving the enemy ahead of them like leaves before a storm.

‘Maker!’ Kymene was shouting, and he looked up and saw movement ahead – not an organized force placed there to delay them, but the main Imperial column, a great mass of men and machines seen in slices between the half-fallen buildings. They were reforming, and he saw Airborne all over the sky searching for roosts from which to shoot, whilst others were milling in the streets. He saw the articulated bulk of a Sentinel clatter into view before it made a scraping turn to face the oncoming enemy.

Rosander was already in motion, tireless, inhuman. The warriors of the Thousand Spines pushed themselves to the front and strode forwards into what must surely be the final battle for Myna. Stenwold saw a ripple of shock course through the Imperial lines at the first sight of them.

Kymene kept advancing, sending her soldiers into the buildings on either side to break up the Wasp shooting positions, and Stenwold pushed forwards to keep up with her, the Maker’s Own spreading out to his right, shooting at any Wasp target that presented itself. The sky was still busy, but the Airborne were being thinned out rapidly, those who could not find cover being picked off by the Collegiate snapbowmen.
When did we become veterans?
Stenwold wondered. But, of course, his own city had been through a lot in the last few years. The Empire had forged the merchants and tradesmen of Collegium into soldiers, and now the Beetles had come to show them their error in that.

Beyond the diminishing Airborne, the remaining flying machines duelled and danced – not a Spearflight to be seen now, just Stormreaders and Farsphex, and it looked to Stenwold as though his own pilots – veterans too – were carrying the day.

A crash sounded from ahead, and he saw a Sentinel plough into the Sea-kinden at full speed, scattering them, crushing a handful beneath it. Its single eye spat fire, the leadshotter ball carving a bloody trough through the Collegiate lines. Then the Onychoi had converged on it, prising and levering at its armour as it tried to shake them off. The cover over its main barrel gaped again, and a Fly-kinden in Maker’s Own colours darted past its face, shoving a grenade into the opening. The flash of the explosive gutted the machine itself but was so well contained by its armour that the surrounding Sea-kinden were barely shaken by it.

He heard Kymene’s clear voice yelling: ‘For Myna! We will rise again!’ and he was just about to throw in his own, ‘Through the Gate!’ when she cried out in pain.

He saw her fall, leg pierced by a snapbow bolt, and a handful of her men cut down with her, Wasp snipers above suddenly making their presence known.

‘Kymene!’ He was immediately labouring over the uneven ground towards her, knowing that he would be too late. ‘Paladrya, stay back!’

He had no idea whether she would or not, but he was closing on the Mynan leader, seeing her clutch at her holed leg while trying to inch herself into cover. A bolt skipped off the stone by his foot, and another cut past his shoulder.

‘Back, Maker!’ Kymene yelled at him, her face pale with pain. A squad of Mynans was pushing into the building to dislodge the snipers, and others were rushing to protect their commander, but they were still too far off. Stenwold had almost reached her, one hand stretched out, waiting for the moment when the next bolt would find her, to snuff her out even as her city was being won.

Something struck him a hammer blow to the skull, and his world flew apart.

The Red Watch man seemed to be on the point of apoplexy when he heard the news. ‘How can they have reached us so fast? How much further to the Mynans?’

Too far
, Gannic thought. Lugging the artillery had done it. The Lowlanders – or whatever those
things
were, because they didn’t look like any Lowlanders he had ever seen – had lacked anything resembling a siege train. If the Imperials had just holed up in the garrison, then they could have held out for tendays against a rabble of infantry, but Red Watch’s tactical genius – or his skewed priorities, rather – had brought them all out into the open like this.

‘Hold them off! Throw them back! Keep up the advance! The Empress wills it!’ Red Watch insisted, and Gannic saw his own despair mirrored in the faces of the other officers nearby.
There is no way
, he thought.
You can’t have it all.

Some of the mid-ranking garrison officers, a couple of majors and some captains, were organizing what defence they could, and were plainly ignoring the voice of the Empress for the foreseeable future. They were sending their best snipers forwards to give the enemy’s sides and rear something to think about, and were trying to throng the buildings on either side with Light Airborne so that the advancing force would get caught in a crossfire.
Too little, too late.
Too many of those buildings were ruinous shells that gave precious little cover, and besides there were Mynans already rushing inside them, braving the shot to fight over the best vantages.
And then
they
’ll be shooting down on
us.

It’s time to leave, I think.
But before he could put that thought into practice, Red Watch had hold of his shoulder. ‘Into the orthopter!’ the man was shouting, and Gannic just stared at him blankly.

‘What, sir?’

‘The orthopter, the Farsphex!’ And, yes, in the direction of Red Watch’s shaking finger, there was a Farsphex, summoned here by who knew what signal. ‘Get in. You can drop the Bee-killer directly on them from the air.’

Gannic stared at him in utter astonishment. ‘Sir, I’m not a pilot.’

‘It’s got a pilot. You can be the . . . what, the bombardier! Do it!’ Red Watch cuffed him across the head with a gauntleted hand. ‘Do it!’

‘Sir, have you seen the
size
of the gas canisters? The Farsphex aren’t kitted out to drop anything that big.’

‘Then you’ll set the thing off and just roll it out of the side hatch!’ Red Watch roared into his face. ‘Go! The Empress commands!’

‘Sir . . .’

Another blow fell. ‘Do it, you traitor!’

‘No, sir, the Mynan—!’

‘We will hold the Mynans!’

Gannic held up his hands, desperately trying to fend off the man’s fists. ‘The
other
Mynans, sir! They’re here!’

At last the Red Watch man stopped and looked round. They had been advancing along one of the main thoroughfares of the city, offering a good straight run up the tiers of steps leading all the way to where they had the Mynan population bottled up. Except the bottle had broken. The locals had realized that help was on the way, and they had not been content to sit around waiting for it. A veritable avalanche of angry Mynan soldiers and citizens was flooding down from the heights with vengeance in mind.

‘Trigger them now!’ Red Watch spat out. ‘The canisters . . . set them off now. Here and now, all of them.’

‘In the middle of our own soldiers?’ Gannic shrieked at him. ‘Are you insane?’

For answer, the Red Watch man grabbed him by the arm and began hauling him towards the laden automotives, shaking him fiercely every time he tried to resist. The man
was
insane, that seemed undeniable, but he possessed all the strength that madmen were supposed to have.

So sting
, Gannic told himself.
Sting him. Stab him. Do something.
And yet he did not. Even considering what Red Watch was going to make him do, even with the enemy on all sides and any chance of escape rapidly vanishing, he found that he was more frightened of the consequences of disobedience right now than of obedience a few minutes later.

Do it, then fly,
he told himself.
Fly and don’t look back.

Then Red Watch was down, a javelin-like bolt skewering his chest, and Gannic tumbled to the ground with him. He scrabbled up only to see the monstrous armoured shock troops of the Lowlanders virtually on top of him. The Imperial lines had broken, unable to contain them. They were all around him, hacking and shooting.

He found that he was still stumbling towards the automotives, as though the Red Watch man had left some posthumous hook in his mind that he could not escape.

He had a second of clarity, caught halfway there, locking eyes with a Beetle-kinden soldier down the length of the woman’s snap-bow barrel. He opened his mouth to make his excuses, to beg some kind of exception –
I’m just an engineer
– and then she shot him. The bolt struck him through the shoulder, throwing him to the ground. A moment later a vast armoured form loomed over him, blotting out the sun.

Gannic shrieked, and a curved sword descended and made an end of him.

After it was done, with Mynans rejoicing on every side, Rosander took off his helm and sucked in a deep breath.

‘Enough,’ he decided. ‘This has to be enough. The bastard was right. It just goes on and on.’

His armour was now a great stone weight around him; it had felt as light as air when he had donned it first. He was hot. He was thirsty.

He was happy, though. He would return to the sea and his warriors would tell the tale: how the Thousand Spines had invaded the land.

And we’ll be back, no doubt.
All that nonsense of secrecy that Maker had cooked up with Hermatyre was well and truly broken open now.
A world of opportunity.
It seemed likely that land and sea were both going to have to make plenty of adjustments.

But we’re Onychoi. We’ll profit.
He felt fiercely proud of his people – not just their fighting spirit, but the engineering and artifice that had allowed them to export it so far.
Chenni’s going to laugh, when she hears.

He lumbered off to find the Lowlander leaders, with the Mynans making sure to get well out of his way.

He found Kymene quickly enough. With her leg being attended to by a surgeon, she was taking reports from her people, but he wasn’t much interested in her. Instead he kept on looking until he found Paladrya sitting huddled outside one of the buildings.

‘Where’s your man? Inside?’ he boomed. ‘I need to speak with him.’

Rosander was not by nature sensitive, but something moved within him as she looked up, red-eyed and trembling, so that his voice was almost gentle when he asked her, ‘What is it?’

Forty

Che looked out, with eyes that knew no darkness, and saw the Worm.

Had I ever realized they were so many, would I have done this differently?

Because, of course, this was not all the Worm’s bodies. Far more than this were now funnelling inwards through their city, climbing the gradient leading into the wider world above, seeking to bring the Worm’s gift to all the world.

The Moths did an evil thing when they sealed this place away.
She wondered if they had ever known – when Argastos and the rest forged the Seal – just what abomination they were opening the way for. Had they any idea what the desperate Centipede-kinden would do, cut off from the outside world and desperate for any means to survive?

And they had failed, in the end. Save for pathetic remnants like the Scarred Ones, they had given themselves over to something that cared nothing for them, and it had merely hollowed them out and consumed them.

Now those shells that were rushing towards the slaves’ prepared positions were not even born of the Centipede. They were the children of the Worm’s slaves, the stolen generations remade in their old masters’ image, force-grown, hollowed out and sent to butcher those who had brought them into the world.

The first sling stones were flying on both sides. Che saw the twin heads of the Worm’s advance ripple with casualties which the main body just moved on over. They barely slowed.

She was here at the highest point of all, the last place the Worm would reach, once all her followers were dead. She was here because this was where the magic would last longest. Here where she might have been able to accomplish something. Here where she had found the limits of her Inapt strength.

There was not enough magic in the whole of the Worm’s world simply to open a door where she pleased, but even if there had been, she could not see her way to it. She could not find the logic unique to ritual that would bring such a result about. She was not enough of a magician, anointed heir to the Khanaphir Masters or not.

She looked back over the host of those who had followed her here – the fighters who were even now bracing themselves against the onrush of the Worm, slingers, rock-pushers, the untrained and awkward who had been given swords and told to stand. She looked over the far greater number who hid behind them: the weak, the young, the old, the desperate. She felt so very, very sorry.