One of the priests reached out for him, and Totho casually backhanded him, smashing his gauntlet into the man’s scar-ravaged face. The warriors closed in, swords levelled, and he let a couple of them strike at him, watching the blades scrape off his mail, before he just pushed his way through them.
He looked up again at that eye-twisting divinity that had robbed him of everything he had believed in. Its reach was finite, though, for it could not rob him of the things he had never believed. Staring up at the fathomless dark of its substance, he knew it could not be what it seemed. There was no magic, and the world ran by firm rules – even if he could not bring them to mind any more.
He continued studying the segmented shape that towered over him, looking past all the boiling darkness that seethed out of it, taking in the rippling legs, the hooked fangs. He held firm to his long-nurtured loathing of the supernatural, his deep-ingrained faith in a mechanistic universe, and his eyes pierced the veil that cloaked the god of the Worm. Strip it to its base shape, and there was nothing remarkable about it but its size. It’s nothing but a big centipede.
‘Is this it?’ he demanded, his voice ringing unnaturally loud throughout the cave. ‘This is your master? I challenge it! I set my armour against it.’ He rounded on the aghast priests. ‘I cannot tell you how this metal was made, but now that it is made, it goes on working. You cannot deny it. You cannot dent it with your stupidity. It is not subject to your belief.’ He saw their baffled expressions. They could not understand what he meant.
He stepped forwards, and the slight shift in the monstrous centipede’s swaying motion showed that it was aware of him.
He looked over at Esmail, seeing the man creeping closer. There’s a time for subtlety. This is not it.
The priests were crowding him now, shoving him forwards towards the lip of that chasm. He let them. One hand drifted towards his belt. There was something very important about his belt. He knew it, he knew it, and yet he could not quite understand it. Something was there, and had there not been a plan . . .?
Then Esmail was amongst the warriors of the Worm, shouting for Totho to get clear. His hands carved them apart, shearing through flesh and armour, dropping three in that first surprise rush. The others turned to fight him, swift and relentless, and he led them about the enclosed confines of the cave, cutting their swords in two with bare-handed parries, or darting in beneath their blows to hack at their bodies. He was outmatched swiftly, but he never let them catch him.
‘Go!’ he was shouting to Totho. ‘Run!’
At the same time, someone barrelled into the priests, striking out at them with a staff. It looked just like one of their own, and Totho could make nothing of that – the intruder seemed almost berserk, though, smashing randomly around and scattering them, freeing Totho up for a moment. Perhaps he, too, expected Totho just to run.
Totho’s thumb found the string at his belt. He could not remember what it was for, only that it was important.
He remembered his conversation with Esmail, back in the prison.
It’s as simple as pulling on a string.
Why had he said that? What would that accomplish? He could no longer remember. Pulling on a string did sound simple, though. One hardly needed to be Apt for that, surely?
His hand was on that string, just one pull required, and yet he could not do it. The necessary link between impulse and action had been broken. He was betrayed by his own Aptitude, which had guided everything he had ever done. Now that its crutch was gone, such a simple move was beyond him.
That vast head struck down, blotting out his entire world, but it seemed confused by the struggling melee before it, instead hammering at the rock, smashing one of the priests into a pulp, then drawing back.
Esmail was coming back round, the warriors right on his heels. ‘Go! Go!’ he was shouting, but only because he did not understand how important all this was. Not for Che, not for Collegium, not for freedom, but for artificers everywhere. This obscenity must go.
Then the Worm lunged again, and this time its hooked claws pincered his body and lifted him up.
The mail held. For a few impossible seconds, the god of the Centipede-kinden strove against the metallurgy of the Iron Glove and could not break it, though Totho felt his cuirass twist and groan, felt the latching between breast- and backplate snap under the force. And still his hand was at his waist, paralysed by ignorance. The dark radiance that the Worm blazed with enveloped him, but he felt the solid physical clutch of its fangs, and knew he was right. The lord of the underworld, the god of sacrifice and slavery, was no more than a vast beast.
Then someone was clinging to him, and he looked down into Esmail’s stricken face as the other man brought the lantern down across the Worm’s head, flaming pieces shattering across its broad carapace, which burned for moments like flaming oil on water before the darkness began to conquer the flames.
In the guttering light of that fire, Totho locked eyes with Esmail and saw understanding there – at last someone who understood. And Esmail had never been Apt: those parts of his mind that this monster was stifling had nothing to do with the urgent instructions Totho had coached him with.
To Esmail, it was just pulling on a string.
The Assassin caught the ripcord that dangled from Totho’s belt, which Totho had carefully fed through all his little devices there, in that tiny corner of the prison where he had last been able to think.
He let go of Totho, falling away back towards the ledge, the cord ripping free. Totho stared down, seeing him vanish into darkness towards that unseen shelf.
The mandibles of god increased their grinding pressure and he felt the two halves of his armour shear, each of them still intact despite it all, but the pressure of their displacement beginning to tear him apart.
The Worm lifted him high towards the cave’s ceiling, fighting against the resistance of the armour, the products of artifice that it could not suppress.
The thing about artifice, was Totho’s last thought, is that it works whether you believe in it or not.
The string of grenades that looped through his belt erupted all at once and tore him in two, killing him instantly and ripping apart the head of the Worm.
Forty-Eight
Straessa backed off, her blade sliding out of a corpse that was suddenly, horribly, not the figure she had just stabbed.
The fighting had stopped, all in that very same moment, and now the Collegiates around her who were not concerned with the wounded were drawing back from the sight before them. A grim hush was falling, broken only by the moans of the injured.
Across the field, on the far side of that choked rift, she could see the Wasps were falling back too, recoiling in revulsion from the mess of bodies that now clogged their breached wall.
‘Gorenn, tell me . . .’ She did not mean, What am I looking at? She knew what she was looking at, and yet she desperately needed some clarification, some comforting lie that would let her address this sight, categorize it and turn it into something she could put behind her. ‘Please, tell me . . .’