Che! she called into that howling void that separated them. I need more. Even now they challenge me, they snatch lives from my grasp. I cannot do this alone any more, please!
You . . . how can you even consider condemning so many people to death? In Seda’s mind the Beetle girl sounded stunned.
Che, I have no choice. Where else can I draw power now but from the blood, the lives? If there was any other way to stop the Worm, don’t you think I’d have tried?
But she could sense the condemnation as clear as if the girl was in the room with her – Collegium’s daughter seeing only the usual Imperial excess.
No, Che, believe me. I do nothing lightly, but we have to stop the Worm. Do you think the magicians of old did no worse, when the need demanded?
I cannot believe it. Che sounded shaken, sickened. Not the Moths, not the Spiders. Not even the Mosquito-kinden themselves. They did not even think on such a scale.
There was more magic then, Seda reminded her sadly. And, even then, you know they did terrible things. And if some Moth Skryre had needed the power, to preserve their world, they would have snuffed out your city and all your people . . . all their slaves. You know it.
A long pause, then: No, said Che. I do not. Because when my ancestors rose against them, that was the time. Before the great days of magic had quite ended, they could have ruined the world rather than lose it, and now they are in their mountain retreats, and we are our own masters. So I believe they chose not to, at the last.
Seda could feel herself shaking with some emotion. She thought it was anger at first, perhaps even shame, grief, horror at what she was even now setting in motion. For a moment she felt that she might see herself in Che’s mirror, as the monster she had become. And yet she had no choice, she reminded herself. The Worm was her responsibility. All emotions, whatever they might be, were banished back to their cage. She had no time to indulge them. Che . . . but she had lost her connection, and she went reaching down and down, hunting for that one fugitive mind that she could reach: her nemesis, her sister . . . the only one who could help her. The only one who could understand.
Then Brugan let out a mewling sound of fright, and she knew Tisamon was back, striding over to her side with his blade still dripping blood. She would have to send him out again, she knew. The deaths must keep coming, and he was the only one she could rely on.
She could feel the worlds grinding against one another, and she began to apply her pressure, using all the finesse and skill she could muster, committing the vast reserves of tainted magic that she had accumulated in the hope that there would be more to follow. A ritual that the Moths would have envied even in their glory days was what she was about: a magic from the old times, to remake the Seal and bury the Worm.
‘Majesty.’ Brugan had taken another message, it seemed. ‘The army.’
‘What?’ she demanded through gritted teeth. ‘Just report, General. You can still make a proper report, can’t you?’
‘Generals Tynan and Marent are ignoring your orders, Majesty,’ Brugan told her, his voice shaking in case her wrath might light on himself, even in passing. ‘They remain beyond the gates. They will not be summoned.’
I have no time for these irrelevances. But they betray me. They already betray me. With so much magic, fragments of prophecy were clouding the air like gnats – all the futures save the one thing she needed to see. Will I succeed? Will Che lend me her strength?
‘Majesty.’ Brugan stopped because he did not dare to contradict her, and so what use was he as an adviser?
‘Tisamon,’ Seda sighed. ‘It must be you, it seems. The general has lost all claim to call himself a man of my kinden. Go forth and kill Tynan and Marent and all they conspire with. Bring their blood. The blood of generals will surely have more power than that of ordinary men.’
And then she heard the faint scratch of Che’s voice. Seda? Do you hear me?
Che? Tell me, Che. Tell me you see that this is necessary.
And that distant, bitter response. Yes. I see what must be done. I will do it. I will help you.
Thirty-Nine
Taki brought her Stormreader in fast over the walls of Myna, thinking how it didn’t seem long since she’d been here last. That time, she had left with the city under bombardment and the Wasps taking the streets one by one, reasserting their control after the Mynans’ brief and fragile period of freedom. Now . . .
Oh, they did a real piece of work on this place. Great swathes of the city were in ruins, some just deserts of rubble, other buildings standing without roofs, without their full complement of walls, eyesocket windows staring out over so much devastation.
Could have been Collegium, she reflected. Stick a lake on it, could be Solarno. Then she was shifting her Stormreader violently in the air because someone was shooting at her.
She was not supposed to have come here with Stenwold and Kymene. She wasn’t of Maker’s Own Company and, if she had given a curse about chains of command, she should have been winging her way towards Capitas even now. But she was firmly of the position that she did absolutely what she wanted, and telling her to do things that she didn’t want was a quick way to see the back of her, whether the orders came from a Sarnesh tactician with a nasty glint in his eye or from Stenwold Maker himself.
What she remembered most in all the war, though, was defending Collegium in the early days, when the Empire’s aerial strength had been so superior, and when she and her fellows had been using every ounce of skill and Collegiate ingenuity just to survive each day and night of the air raids.
So many of the men and women who had fought alongside her had been Mynans. They had traded in their ragbag assortment of machines for Stormreaders, and they had given the inexperienced locals their backbone, their fighting spirit. And they had died, her fellow pilots, her peers and her allies and her friends. So many of them had given their lives for Collegium, without hesitation.
And this was what they had dreamt of: the return to Myna. Some of those airmen and women were with her even now, coursing swiftly through the sky, throwing themselves against the Spearflights and the Farsphex of the enemy. Others were with them only as names and memories, but it was for them that Taki had come too.
She turned the Stormreader on one wingtip, neatly as ever her old Esca had handled, her rotaries severing the tail of a clumsy Spearflight and sending it spinning out of her course. There were mindlinked Imperial Farsphex pilots here, but they were still too few to prevent the airships coming in, with Taki and the Mynan pilots driving them away. The flower of the Imperial Air Corps had fallen over Collegium, and the replacement pilots and machines had been scattered across too many fronts.
She let her orthopter swing wide to see how the airships were getting on. One was coming down some way outside the walls, and she guessed that its envelope had been holed a few times and its crew had not wanted to risk a drop. Another was actually descending onto the wall itself, and she saw Imperial troops desperately flying and scrabbling to get up there and oppose the landing, like a siege from an upside-down world.