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.
There seemed no other option now, no better use she could make of her power and her time. She could not save these people. They would die, and nobody in the world beyond would ever know that they had even lived.
But there was something she could achieve while she still had time before the Worm took her. There was yet a cause she could give herself over to.
She understood Seda’s plan now, the terrible details, the ocean of blood the woman would drown herself in. She understood why – the inexorable logic to save the world from the Worm.
And I know the horrors of the Worm, of all people. Seda had called on her, all enmities put aside. What little Che still possessed, she needed.
Seda, she sent out, do you hear me?
And the distant response, Seda’s voice strung as taut as a bow. Che? Tell me, Che. Tell me you see that this is necessary.
Che felt sick at what she must do, the betrayal of so much, but what else was there? There was a point when all pretence was stripped away, and she could see herself just as she was, and know the limits beyond which she could not go. Yes, I see what must be done. I will do it. I will help you.
There, I’ve said it. Had she doomed herself and Thalric and Tynisa and all these people, or were they doomed already? I think that this graveyard of a world is the one place that even I cannot make worse with my mistakes.
Esmail was a planner by nature. He was used to having time to prepare, absorbing all the information he could raid from the minds of his victims, then to plot his entrance, his exit, his fallback. He was also used to having his magical abilities to hand, and to facing an enemy that acted and reacted in something like a human manner.