The sight came back to Esmaiclass="underline" that vast, blinding questing head, the segment upon segment of clutching legs, the poisoned claws the size of a man. He had looked upon the thing the scarred priests worshipped and he had known that he could never do so again. He had never truly known fear until he had beheld the Worm.
And now he heard himself saying, ‘Then we go after him. We ambush them on the way down, or . . . we take him from the Worm’s jaws, if we have to.’
He glared at the Hermit, and saw a wondering, pitying expression on the old man’s face.
‘Oh, lead on,’ the turncoat Centipede advised. ‘You go ahead and show me what you’ll do. At least someone will know, after you’re gone, just how mad you were before the end.’
And at the last, the work was done, and all the prisoners were returned to the pit.
Sartaea te Mosca stood there, just able to see because most of the rest were too tired to stand when the slavers weren’t actively whipping them. She stood proud of a sea of slumped shoulders and bowed heads, and watched.
The engineers had finished laying their fuses: that had been a complex and delicate job, and she had been given plenty of time to observe their faces. Unlike the slavers, they did not wear full-face helms to make themselves creatures of anonymous fear. They were young, many of them, and they were frightened. One of them had been weeping, even as he worked. None of them had wanted to look at the prisoners.
They had known what they had, in those great metal drums. The Bee-killer was to the Empire what a hero of the Days of Lore was to the Mantis-kinden: everyone knew the name; everyone was familiar with the deeds. And, just like those Mantis heroes, the Bee-killer’s deeds were death, the death of vast numbers in such a brief time.
Why don’t the others rise up? Te Mosca wondered. There were so many prisoners, and the channels cut into the edge of the pit should make escape even easier. We should rush them! Someone should yell out some battle cry, and we’d all go surging out and knock down all the Wasps, and be free. Why doesn’t someone do that?
And she stood, a tiny figure, knowing herself to be so small as to be helpless before the Wasps. She knew whoever might give out such a cry would die for it. She knew the stings and the blades and the sheer physical strength of the Wasps – she felt them like a razor at her neck, like a knife close to her eye. And she said nothing. And they all said nothing. Starved, beaten, half-naked, sick, dying; there was no will left for defiance amongst the slaves.
Te Mosca wanted to call to the Wasps: I am a Master of the College! I trained in magic with the Moth-kinden! I have healed wounds and saved lives! I am someone! I matter! But, standing in that great assembly of the doomed, she was less and less convinced in that last article of faith. She was only valuable to the world in one way: one more life to be snuffed like a candle.
Then Metyssa was speaking again. Her voice shook and trembled: she was hunched in on herself, hugging her bony knees, head down, and yet somehow her voice still floated free. She began to tell them about the end of the war.
She told them how it came to pass: how the great Imperial war machine came to be dismantled; how peace came to all the lands of the kinden. She told it as though it was some fable from long ago, just the sort of story the Inapt grew up on. No rooftop chases or derring-do now, but a gentle story of a world grown sane. A story where soldiers put away the toys of war and went home to their wives and mothers and lovers. In her story, Collegium and Myna were rebuilt in their old glories, and the Commonweal was free of the shadow that oppressed it. Rival Spider families clasped hands as friends, and Ant cities spoke of treaties and shared works for the benefit of all. And it was magic, te Mosca knew. She had never realized that Metyssa had any magic in her, but she felt it stir in the Spider now. It was a strange, weak storyteller’s magic, released at the end of all things as if it could change the world.
But the world had grown old and turned away from such childish things as magic. Even te Mosca could not find much belief in such things within her breast. Captivity had made her like one of the Apt, seeing nothing in the world but their cold and inexorable mechanisms. Metyssa spoke on and on, until her words seemed to be the only sound in the world, but it made no difference. None of it made any difference any more.
Then another voice cut across her, ignoring her as though she was nothing. ‘Now’s the time,’ the Red Watch man snapped, like someone late for an appointment. ‘She needs it all now. Ready with the detonator?’
A handful of the engineers had been at work on some mechanism a short distance from the pit – te Mosca had seen it when the digging was going on. Now she became desperate to see it again. It had abruptly become the most important thing in her world. She tugged and nagged and badgered Poll Awlbreaker until he let her onto his shoulders, and from there she saw the instrument of all their extinctions.
It seemed a very little thing: just a box, really. A box with thick cords that issued from it, leading to all the canisters. Poll had said there would be firepowder within them, and charges at the barrels, all timed to break open at the same killing instant.
The Red Watch man stalked to the lip of the pit and looked in: to te Mosca’s knowledge it was the first time he had actually set eyes on the people he was arranging to murder.
‘Remarkable,’ he declared, in tones plainly intended to carry all the way across to the cages. ‘It’s hard to think they could have any value at all, isn’t it? And yet they have one use left . . .’ And he was left frowning, because he had obviously anticipated an attentive audience, of slavers and slaves both, and only those within arm’s reach – and te Mosca – were really listening.
For Metyssa was still talking, ignoring their tormentors – ignoring the whole Empire and all written history to date, it seemed – and spinning her hopeless, impossible fable of some world where things had happened differently.
The Red Watch man made a start on another few platitudes, for apparently this was an occasion worthy of a speech to him, but he petered out each time, and at last he demanded, ‘Shut that woman up!’
‘What does it matter?’ the lead slaver asked him in a low growl. ‘Let her talk, why not? It won’t change anything.’
The man with the red pauldrons stared at him. ‘I do not want to hear her voice. I do not want to hear any of their voices. They are not permitted to mar this moment. Silence her.’
For a long moment the two Wasps stared at one another, and then the slaver dropped into the pit with a handful of his people, and they kicked and slapped their way to Metyssa. That was surely the moment to take them, if there ever was one, but by then even te Mosca had stopped believing in it. The Wasps were so fiercely full of vitality, the slaves so feeble and wasted.
The lead slaver stood over Metyssa, and even in his shadow she kept talking.
‘Do it!’ the Red Watch man shouted at him. But the slaver just stared, and the story rambled on, telling of homes and hearths, of better days and bluer skies. And then the Wasps were on the wing, back out of the pit without a blow struck.
‘Just do what you came for,’ the slaver spat. ‘Piss on your speeches. Just get it over with.’
Red Watch ground his teeth and flexed his fingers at that, but it was plain that the mood of the slavers was frustrated and ugly. They had always been the least disciplined branch of the army, and te Mosca understood that accidents had happened before, with officers who had pushed them too far.