But the Hermit was of their kind, too, and when he said, ‘Leave them. What do they matter now?’ Esmail deferred to him. He felt he owed the old man that much respect for having been able to break those bonds himself and thus become something resembling a human being.
Or at least as much as I do, anyway. Weary, hurting, disgusted, Esmail led the way back up to the city.
It was just as he knew it would be. Every street, every space, had been taken up by that vast spiralling progress: the warriors of the Worm off on their crusade to master the wider world. The sight made him sick, that slew of the half-grown, the ultimate victims of the Worm’s madness, extending as far as his torchlight could reach in every direction, and then everywhere he went.
But then his head jerked up in surprise, because that vast stone city was not silent.
For a second he stopped, heart hammering, trying to work out what it was that he was hearing, that shrill, drawn-out, squalling sound from the centre of the vast maze of stone. Then he locked eyes with the Hermit.
‘The child pits.’
And they were there, of course, the most recent taxes that the Worm had exacted, the last few crops of children who had not yet lost their kinden and been turned into the Worm. The pits where the final phases of metamorphosis had been penned were still and corpse cluttered, but the youngest still lived – though for how long, if Esmail could not do something? He stared down helplessly, seeing that seething vat of need and hunger and despair, and just trembling at his own utter lack of power. What could he do?
Then he knew what he could do.
Soon after that, he had rounded them up – the other survivors. He was surprised at just how many there were, despite the toll the Worm must have taken on them towards the end. He had all the surviving prisoners, those who had not been led down for sacrifice. More than that, he had the Scarred Ones, the last enclave of the Centipede-kinden – old and young, adult and child, men and women – standing in a frightened, unruly group before the child pits, staring with loathing at Esmail and the Hermit.
‘Get them out,’ Esmail ordered. ‘Get them all out. Feed them. Carry them if you have to. Keep them alive.’
When one of them stepped forward to question why they should do what he said, Esmail killed him with a single blow of his hand.
‘Listen to me,’ he told them, without a grain of mercy in his tone. ‘I hate you all. I would gladly see each one of you dead, and you deserve it, each one of you. What? No warriors to kidnap and kill for you? No great army to live in the guts of, and perpetuate, and pretend you had no choice? The man standing beside me is living proof that you had a choice. If you do as I say now, this one token act of atonement, then perhaps – just perhaps – your miserable kinden might be permitted to survive. Defy me and I will kill each and every one of you myself. And I can. And I will. Just give me an excuse.’
Slowly, fearfully, the former priesthood of the Worm began to move. They moved stubbornly, bitterly, and yet they moved to his bidding. In a way he was disappointed that he was not able to make more of an example of them.
Forty-Nine
Epilogues
The camps emptied, one by one, those where the Empress’s will had been thwarted. Imperial citizens returned home to cities that were suddenly more than mere vassal states. Slaves returned to slavery, because change comes gradually and unevenly, and three generations of Imperial history cast a long shadow. Spiders were sent back in long chains to their southern cities. They were all of them currency and bargaining chips in the delicate game of diplomacy that the nations of the kinden were playing in order to extricate themselves from a war that none of them abruptly had the desire for; in order to step back from the brink.
And a band of Collegiate prisoners was eventually remembered and permitted to board an airship to head for home.
In those camps where the orders had been obeyed, where the Empress had been granted her harvest of lives, the burial details waited for the poisonous haze of the Bee-killer to recede. So closed an episode of Imperial history that nobody living now understood, but everyone would remember.
Sitting at the end of a pier on Collegium docks, Laszlo sat staring out to sea, his feet swinging over the water. Looking down, he could see the great metal carcass of an Imperial Sentinel that had been dragged into the water during the retaking of the city, now nothing more than a hazard to shipping.
A great many things were happening in the world, but relatively few of them held any interest to him just then.
Lissart had gone, of course.
She had thanked him. He had saved her from Milus’s clutches, and then he had given her the opportunity to have her revenge. He had somehow thought that would bind her to him, that she would look at him and see something similar to what he saw, when he looked at her.
‘There’ll be another time,’ she had assured him, but when he had begged her to tell him where she planned to go, she had demurred. ‘That would spoil the surprise,’ had been what she told him, but he’d known that she had not wanted him coming after her, just as he had known that he would not have been able to stop himself from doing so, if she had given him any hint.
She was at large somewhere in the world, that duplicitous, untrustworthy arsonist of a girl, and here he sat staring out at the sea and mourning her already.
‘Hey, loser.’
He looked up irritably, not feeling in the mood for Despard’s jibes. The Tidenfree’s chief artificer had always possessed an abrasive sense of humour.
‘Gude wants to know,’ she insisted. ‘We can’t just sit around at anchor here forever.’
‘Go away.’
‘Let me put it another way, Laszlo. The Bloodfly wants to know. You’re going to tell her to go away?’
‘If I have to.’
Despard uttered a derisive noise and lit off again for the ship along the quayside. It looked just like a swift little merchantman, but it had been one of the most notorious pirate vessels of its day, and would be so again. With or without him.
Stenwold Maker, Laszlo’s friend and patron, was dead. Why would he stay in this war-bruised city? And yet he had no other destination. Liss had not given him a hint of one.
‘Laszlo?’
Another voice. He looked up to see Sperra, the woman from Princep. She was regarding him uncertainly but, before he could turn away, she had sat beside him, in the manner of someone conquering their own fears.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked her. ‘I thought . . .’
‘Princep can manage without me,’ she said, desperately trying to appear casual. ‘I just wanted to see how you were doing.’
He studied her for a long time. He knew full well that she had taken a shine to him, and he also knew that, on occasion, he had taken advantage of that to get her and her Ant friend to do things for him. He was not proud of that.
But, still, here she was and with an obvious purpose, for all that she would not speak it. One word from him and he would be rid of her, and he could see her bracing for it, ready to risk the hurt, but hoping for the small chance that he might say something different.