‘Then you do it.’
Totho shook his head urgently. ‘You don’t understand. You can’t. One step . . . one step forwards and I lose it. I can’t . . . I won’t be able to . . .’
Then the creatures of the Worm were retreating, taking their chosen sacrifices with them, and Esmail was backing off.
‘Forget all that,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll get a rope. I’ll find some way out, if there’s a way to be found.’ Then he was carefully making his way back across the ceiling, one limb at a time, teeth gritted with the effort, following in the trail of the Worm.
There was no forced marching of the slaves of the Worm. Many were injured or ill, or simply weak from hunger. Some – the lucky few – had children to slow them down. The great mass of them crawled across the barren and bleak terrain, torches and lanterns scattered randomly amongst them. They were making the best time they could, but it was painfully slow. Originally, Che had been using whatever Moth-kinden were willing to act as her eyes, spying out the ground ahead and to either side, wary of the approach of the Worm. That had not turned out well. The great mass of movement, the constant comings and goings in the air, had attracted the attention of the monsters they knew as the White Death, and several Moths had been snatched in mid-flight. Now Che was having to rely on scouts on the ground – anyone with good enough eyes for the pitch dark and who could run fast. Still most of her volunteers were Moths; it seemed almost surreal that their people – so isolated and haughty up above – were some of her most willing helpers here.
She had no idea of the level of the Worm’s awareness, whether it was relying on the eyes of its creatures, or whether the sheer movement of so many would communicate itself through the stone to the creature as it lurked down in its hole. The topography of this realm was baffling, and she knew that a simple straight journey must in some way also follow a curve to accommodate the simple fact that all roads led eventually to that blighted city. The very thought made her head ache.
Then the scouts began returning, some of them running, some risking a dash through the air. The Worm was on its way, a great snaking column of its human segments, following the path of the refugees and gaining on them with every step.
‘How far are we from these caves?’ Che demanded of Messel.
‘At this speed? Many hours,’ he told her.
‘Lorn detachment?’ Thalric suggested. ‘Whip the rest into a decent pace, and some poor bastards’ll have to stay back and do what they can. Messel, we need terrain we can use. Find us a slope, some useful overhangs – let’s get some rockslides set up.’
The blind man nodded rapidly, and then he and the Wasp were off, trying to round up fighters out of the mass of moving people.
‘They’re not going to get much faster,’ Tynisa murmured in Che’s ear. ‘Not without leaving people behind.’
‘We won’t leave anyone behind.’
‘You can’t save everyone.’
Che glared at her. ‘You’re starting to sound like Thalric.’
‘Maybe he makes sense sometimes. Che, there’s only one way to slow the Worm, and it involves people dying.’
A sacrifice to the Worm. Che shivered. ‘It won’t come to that,’ she insisted hollowly. And meanwhile she had kept driving her mind ahead, hunting options, trying to feel out what she herself might be able to accomplish.
So little magic here, but more than there was. What can I gather? What is my strength worth?
If the worst came to the worst, she would use it all up, every grain, in the hope that she could break through. In the hope that it was possible for her to create her own doorway. She had had a moment’s doubt as the great mob of slaves set off. Should she just have them hold still while she tried to exercise her powers? Could she not simply tear apart this stone world and let them out into the sun?
She had conceived an image then, as though it was a vision of the future. An image of herself, Che, kneeling and fighting with this intransigent, uncooperative nature of the world, surrounded by starving, desperate slaves, as the Worm arrived. With no idea if she could ever achieve what she sought, she chose to keep moving. At least it offered the illusion of progress.
Thalric sought her out later. ‘Che, I need your help.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I need your eyes.’
The scouts had identified an ambush point up ahead, where there seemed some chance that a few stragglers could delay the pursuing Worm. Thalric himself did not trust their assessment, because he had no respect for any of the former slaves.
‘I’ve been all over it, but it’s like looking at a picture through a keyhole. I can’t keep track of the lie of the land properly. I need you to tell me I’m right.’
She flew ahead with him, leaving Tynisa in nominal charge of the great shambling mass of travellers. What the scouts had found was a path that ran between a rock-strewn slope on one side and the upcurving edge of the world on the other: a jagged, fractured cliff that offered a handful of sizeable ledges.
‘So we get people up on the ledges, we get the Moles to fetch rocks up to them. That’s our deadfall for when the Worm soldiers arrive. We have some fighters stationed up the slope – slingers and swordsmen. They’ll get charged, but the footing’s poor and the Worm’s going to have a lot to worry about. So, tell me, have I got the right of it? Only it’s like trying to fix an automotive while blindfold, doing this.’
‘You’d trust my judgement?’
‘Don’t get too excited. I just trust it more than theirs.’ But there was a fond humour in his tone.
‘I think it will work. But we’ll need to get everyone through before the Worm can catch us,’ she decided.
‘Then we need to get them to hurry, don’t we?’
As his wings ghosted into life, she put a hand on his arm. ‘Thalric.’
Wings still out, a barely visible film in the air about his shoulders, he waited.
‘Thank you,’ she told him.
‘For sticking alongside you? Not as if I had much choice.’ But, still, not said bitterly.
‘For everything.’
‘Che, what is it?’
And now she was scaring herself, because a sense of dread was upon her, unaccountable, irresistible, rearing its head within her mind. Her fear had communicated itself to Thalric. She saw him go tense, and his face twitch with tension.
She pulled him to her, held him tight. Still there was nothing, only that unreasoning feeling, that certainty of doom. The magic is seeping in. Unasked prophecy. Unasked and useless.
But there they were: she saw more scouts returning, could read the panic on their faces.
They gabbled out their news as soon as they located her, as though desperate to be rid of it. There was another column of the Worm, ahead of them, and closing in.
It took them far too long to gather all the fugitives together, and then Che could only tell them one thing: that they would be going no further. For there was nowhere else to go.
When Thalric had chosen this place, he had picked it as a good point to mount a brief stand, an attempt to gain time for the fugitives by making the Worm pay a little, by providing a distraction. The Worm was hungry and, despite the best efforts of the Scarred Ones to direct it onwards, an offering of a few tenacious defenders should occupy its attention for a little extra time.
That was no longer an option. The Worm was closing in on all sides. Mindless or not, it had sensed its prey.
The rise that Thalric had picked for his putative defenders was now under Che’s command, heading up the slope as far as she could go with the non-combatants, the injured, the young. The rest of the slaves were below, preparing for their last stand. Thalric assumed that they would buckle almost instantly, would beg their former masters for mercy. If that happened, then the massacre here would see hundreds dead in the first few minutes.