‘I . . .’ It sounded wrong, spoken like that. ‘I came to rescue her.’
There was a choking sound, and for a moment Totho could not identify it.
Messel was laughing awkwardly. He probably did not get much opportunity to do so.
‘Rescue?’ the blind man wheezed. ‘From what? From all of the Worm? From my world?’
‘I thought she would be . . .’ Someone’s prisoner, or something, not queen of the new revolution. ‘That’s why I came, anyway.’
A pause long enough for Totho to worry that Messel had just crept away, until at last he demanded, ‘Get me light,’ just to prompt a reaction. ‘A lantern, Or just something that will burn. I have a lighter here.’
‘You are a magician?’
‘Piss off,’ Totho snapped, and then, a little more gently. ‘I . . . you don’t need to be a magician to set stuff on fire, believe me.’
‘To have got here at all, you surely must be a magician.’ There was a strained tone to the man’s voice.
‘There was a cave, and your Worm bastards had been in and out of it. I wanted to go and get Che out, so I went in after them. No magic, just my feet.’
He heard a sharp, ragged breath, and then something prodded him. When he snatched at it, he found a handful of leathery stalks.
‘You walked into the lair of the Worm? From the outside?’
Totho waited until after he had coaxed a flame from his steel lighter and applied it to the stalks. The tough fungal growth took light only stubbornly, leaving him staring dumbly at the little gadget in his hand, its function and use rapidly fading from his mind.
Which means . . .
‘They’re back!’ he spat, but Messel was already tugging at his arm.
‘Now is the time to run!’ And he was swiftly away on the trail of the fugitives. Totho ripped his sword from one of the bodies around him and then stumbled off in Messel’s wake, running straight into a world of darkness and trying to keep up, the blind leading the blind.
‘It’s not working,’ was Thalric’s harsh assessment. ‘Yes, we’re managing to get plenty of people out before the Worm-kinden turn up. But fight? A rebellion? I’ve seen them, Che. They can’t fight. They have no training, no discipline, borrowed weapons and precious little courage. Most of them have been afraid their whole life. They’re just slaves, Che.’
‘And you know about slaves,’ she said bitterly.
He shrugged, needing to add nothing.
‘But . . . Myna,’ she persisted. ‘They threw off the Empire.’
‘And there were still some there who remembered a time before we invaded, and they are a warrior people, like the Ants, like my kinden. This lot? They’re hopeless, Che. Even the ones that have some heart are just getting themselves killed. And it’s worse than that. We’ve gathered a whole load with us here, yes, but we’ve not saved them from anything. We’re running out of everything. If the Worm hadn’t required its slaves to find their own food, everyone here would have starved long ago. But this is like living in a desert, down here. They’ve scoured this place bare already, and there are almost no stocks left.’
They were in the midst of a great sprawling slum composed of the Worm’s slaves, people who had fled their homes with whatever they could carry, or nothing at all. A host of them stretched into the darkness on all sides, and behind Che their numbers scaled a cave-pocked rock face as well. They were desperate, all of them. Had they stayed where they were, then the Worm would have harvested most of them to aid it in its push towards the wider world, but it now seemed she had just delayed the inevitable.
She looked from Thalric’s face to that of Tynisa, who had been brooding over her own thoughts. ‘Give me options, then,’ she urged them.
She had been hoping for Tynisa to suggest some piece of Mantis-kinden aggression, some mad strike at the heart of the Worm. Instead, her foster-sister just shook her head. ‘I can’t fight, Che,’ she murmured. ‘Whatever this Worm does, it . . . I’m hurt, Che. The wound comes back, whenever they’re near, and I can’t get free of it. I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry.’
Thalric grimaced. ‘As for me, I don’t know about your . . . end of things, but it’s the same problem. Yes, you can defeat a more numerous army, especially as these Worm-kinden aren’t exactly tacticians and don’t have much variety of troops. You need something more, though: better equipment, better training. If we could get them coming after us, and control where they went, then . . . traps maybe. These wretches are good for a rock-slide, but that needs very specific terrain, and we only get one shot at it in any engagement. And anything more complex than that . . . we have no artifice to rely on, because of their . . . that thing they do. What they take from us. And I’ve tried. I’ve even tried to make sharpshooters from our slingers, to kill off the scarred bastards. Except they’re not actually leading the fight. I get the feeling they can guide matters, add some strategy, but sometimes the Worms fight even better when they’re not there.’
‘Perhaps we can . . . attack their city,’ Che whispered. ‘That is where their master is, the mind behind them all. If we could . . . somehow . . .’
‘Che, Esmail’s just returned from there, and he says it can’t be done,’ Thalric cautioned. ‘He also says the place is crawling with them. All the Worms who aren’t hunting us or actually . . . heading up, whatever . . . are there, in that city. Which means that if we tried to go there, we’d basically end up fighting all the locals plus every single one of them who’s already trying to find us. Which is almost all of them. And it’s not as if this pack of bolt-fodder could pull off a sneak attack, even if the enemy couldn’t see in the dark . . . even if they ever actually slept, which Esmail says they don’t. And most of our fodder here aren’t even combatants, by any stretch of the definition.’
Che was staring at him desperately, and she realized that this was the limit: that she had thought him sufficiently resourceful in ruthless ways she herself could not countenance, and that he would always have a plan. He just looked at her, a man who had left his hope behind, his face gaunt and pale in the unhealthy firelight.
After having slept, cold and shivering on the hard stone, surrounded by the quietly mounting misery of those she had wanted to save, she woke and had no new answers, except to know that the pressing needs from before had only become more pressing.
Then Messel arrived. She saw him heading through camp with a knot of people trailing in his wake – new arrivals – asking questions and being pointed towards her. It was strange, for to start with she had been almost unable to distinguish him from the rest of his eyeless kinden. Now she couldn’t imagine not knowing him. It was just a matter of looking beyond that absence.
‘Cheerwell,’ he hailed her. He looked grimy and ragged and worn to a nub, but terribly animated, as though something within him was on fire. ‘I must speak to you. Something remarkable has happened.’
‘I could use something remarkable,’ she replied sadly. ‘Sit with me, Messel, please. Tell me.’
Tynisa and Thalric were just stirring, but the blind man’s next words startled them fully awake.
‘There is a name . . . a man you know. Totho, he called himself.’
Che felt her world shift sideways abruptly; things she thought she had understood suddenly uncertain. ‘How can you know that name?’
‘I was with him,’ Messel told her. ‘He came here searching for you.’