As she watched – as they all watched – he reached up and pulled off the helm. Beneath, his face was pallid and bluish, but still him. Whatever those pale eyes looked out on, though, was not his daughter or any other thing in that buried world.
His lips moved slightly, though no words came out.
‘Kill them!’ Seda yelled at him desperately, and his eyes focused, seeing not the Empress, but Tynisa.
He smiled slightly – in benediction? Who could say? Then he turned to go, and was nothing but a fragmenting pattern of shadows, gone as if he had never been.
Seda let out a scream of anguish, of lost control, and Tynisa forced herself onto one knee, trying to get her legs beneath her before the Worm regained the initiative and destroyed her with that pain. She locked eyes with the Empress, and spotted the very moment that the raging Wasp woman cast off the shackles Che had been trying to lay on her.
The stingshot punched solidly beneath Tynisa’s ribs and slammed her back to the ground.
Thalric partly crawled, partly ran and was mostly hauled on by Messel, pushing through the panicking, milling non-combatants, catching fleeting, clashing moments of what was going on ahead. Che simply stood there, seemingly doing nothing, and Thalric could not follow the duel between Tynisa and her father at all, save that every time he saw her, Tynisa seemed weaker and weaker, whilst the armoured behemoth that was Tisamon never changed.
And then for a moment, just as he and Messel broke free from the crowd and lurched out onto that shrinking patch of clear ground that the refugees had given Che, he saw Tisamon leave for good. No uncertainty there: not just dancing in and out of sight as he had before. The man turned, and the light of some other place and time played across his face, and something seemed to drop away from him – no, something returned to him, some innate part of Tisamon that even Thalric could tell had been lacking.
And he was gone, and Tynisa was levering herself up.
Thalric saw Seda kill her.
Che was shrieking her sister’s name, and Thalric saw the Empress’s uninjured hand turn towards her.
Now or never, he thought and, shouting his body’s objections down, he called up his wings no matter how badly it hurt, and hurled himself like a missile, to knock Che clear.
The stingshot struck him in the chest, but he had his Commonweal mail on, which scattered the fire away so that he felt only a solid impact. Then he was up, with Che squirming out from beneath him, and his own hand was directed straight at his Empress. His shoulder was a festering knot of raw pain and the whole miserable underground world was wheeling about him, fit to make him sick. But I’ve had worse, he knew. Ask all the bastards who’ve tried to kill me if I’ve not had worse.
He looked into the face of Seda and spat, ‘Die.’
‘No,’ she said. Her smile was manic, too wide, unhinged. ‘You are mine, Thalric, and you cannot kill me.’
And she was right. Looking into her face, that beautiful, delicate face, he fought to send his Art against her, and could not. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and he had shared her bed, and if she could not win him to her cause, she could still master him enough to be safe from him forever.
Then something punched into her leg, close to where Tynisa had stabbed her, and Seda dropped to the ground with a hoarse yell of incredulous pain. Her hands spat fire – a searing bolt clipped his shoulder and sent him skidding away from Che. A second stingshot burst near Messel, driving him back even as he was reaching for another sling stone.
Messel. Thalric already had the plan in mind as he saw the man. The eyeless cave-kinden was an unlikely saviour, but he had one advantage over the rest of them.
Thalric threw himself forwards – yet another jolt of bone-jarring pain, but who was counting? – and spun himself about with a jagged flourish of his wings so that he ended up feet first in Che’s fire.
Three quick kicks was all it took to rain its burning pieces down on to the cowering slaves below, and plunge them all into unrelieved blackness.
He heard Seda’s voice lifted in terrible fear of that all-consuming dark, and then her sting was flashing, lighting brief slices of the underworld and looking for enemies. Thalric only hoped that Messel was bold enough to stand up and take a shot. He himself was too busy dragging himself downslope for the little cover that might grant him. And please, Che, be smart enough to do the same!
She was not.
He saw none of it, only that one moment Seda was lashing about herself in a frenzy of stingshot, and the next moment the Empress of the Wasps keened out a last hideous sound . . . and then there was neither Art nor answer from her.
The battle below surged on, and Thalric could hear it getting closer. Then people were stepping on him, and he clawed his way back upslope, calling out Che’s name.
‘Here.’ He heard her, and because he had to see, because he had to know, he loosed a handful of stingshots up into the air, piecing the scene together from the after-image left by those flashes.
There was Che, cradling Tynisa’s still form, her shortsword dark with blood. Beyond her, sprawled like a toy, lay the corpse of the last scion of the Imperial line, Seda the First.
Thalric crawled over to her, groping blindly until Che took his hand.
‘I forgot you could see in the dark,’ he got out.
‘It’s just about all I still have,’ she told him, pulling him close.
‘Tell me what the battle looks like,’ he asked.
After a moment’s pause, she said, ‘It doesn’t look like a battle any more.’
He stared blindly out into the darkness that held the end of them both, now, and everything else besides. ‘Ah . . . Well, then, I have a few complaints about the way this whole business has been handled. When should I take them up with you?’
She was holding him very tightly and trembling now, whether for dead Tynisa or for what she could see before her. ‘Can it wait for tomorrow?’
‘Surely.’ With his next ragged breath he let go of something he had been holding on to for a long time. It might have been hope. ‘Che?’
Her lips found his.
The Worm carved its way closer, filling the sightless black with the screams of its victims.
Totho stared up into the face of god.
He stared at the night-black silhouette of that vast pronged head, seeing its antennae scour the edges of the cavern. It chewed over its current victim, mouthparts rending and tearing that ragged fragment of humanity between them with unthinking, destructive hunger until the face-swarming pitch of it had overwritten it all, all that its victim had been, now simply absorbed to become one more tormented visage floating on the surface of the void.
There seemed to be a lot of room in his mind for thought. Normally Totho’s brain was clogged with Aptitude, but now it had been hollowed out, all thoughts of importance were crushed by the weight of this . . . this thing before him.
A writhing wound at the world’s heart. Almost blind, mindless, ignorant, and so much the very centre of its expanding kingdom that it could abide nothing but its own ignorance. And it was an ignorance that it forced on all those in its presence; that it sent out along with its human puppets, for them to carry to the ends of the earth. He had witnessed this monster’s servitors venturing out into the world he knew. The blind man Messel had told him that the Worm was moving out from its lair into the wider world.
He could not now grasp the delicate thoughts of an artificer, but he could understand that here before him was the death of all Aptitude – and of magic too, if magic actually existed – the cessation of human thought, a despot of conformity and blinkered tyranny that could not brook anything challenging its monotonous, meaningless world.