And she saw it then, at his feet, a long, sinuous, weaving shape. It must have been five feet in length, and she felt an instinctive revulsion as soon as she saw it. The world was full of venomous creatures, but none had a reputation as bad as this sort, so that sane people killed these creatures wherever they found them. But why? Let the academics of Collegium argue as they would, nobody could say just why. Except Che, right now. She understood why the mere sight of a centipede sent shudders down the spines even of the Apt, and why there were so many stories casting them as deadly killers.
It was the Worm; they were remembering the Worm. The beast there, with its whip-like antennae and curved claws full of venom; the ridged scars that ornamented the old man’s hide; the very line of soldiers, just segments of a greater whole, undifferentiated and mindless. Symptoms of the same ancient disease.
‘This is too soon,’ Atraea quavered. ‘You cannot be here for the tax.’
‘You will have your people present their tribute,’ the old man – the Scarred One – informed her. He sounded bitter, human, and he regarded Atraea with the contempt of an owner for his slave.
‘But you were here . . . I have marked the time faithfully, I have!’
‘The Great Lord demands,’ the Scarred One said. ‘Do not believe that scratching marks on the wall allows you to guess the plans of god. Do as you are told.’
‘But what has changed?’ Atraea begged him.
‘Do not tempt a further tax of Cold Well.’ The Scarred One sounded almost bored, like a College bureaucrat dealing with a student who had filled in the wrong papers. The threat plainly went straight to the heart of Atraea, though, for she was bowing and nodding, practically kissing the man’s filthy feet.
‘I will, I will,’ she promised. ‘It will be as the Great Overlord commands. Please . . .’
But the old man was turning aside, stepping back past his men. Che shivered to watch them follow him, the entire line of them moving like a single living thing. The centipede itself remained a moment, its front segments lifted from the ground, its trident of a head casting from side to side as if sensing that all was not as it should be. Che froze, fearing that it had sniffed her out somehow, but then the beast dropped back down and coursed fluidly off after the priest.
Atraea was already gone, but they could hear her thin, hopeless voice crying out beyond: ‘We must do as they say! Do not defy them, or we will suffer all the more! Please, my people, please!’
‘Cold Well goes hungry this season, then,’ Thalric murmured. ‘I’ll admit I’ve seen the same in the Empire on occasion.’
‘You have not,’ Messel told him flatly. ‘You do not understand. Of course you do not understand.’
There was something in his voice, some dead echo, that affected Che. ‘Then make us understand,’ she urged. ‘Tell us. Show us.’
He crept past her, fingers brushing the stone as he moved to the cave’s entrance. ‘Then see,’ he told them. ‘And see what you have been sent to save us from. See the Worm at work.’
They moved to the entrance of Atraea’s cave cautiously, but it was Che alone who went so far as to put her head outside, so that she could witness what was going on.
Work at the foundry had stopped. All the people of Cold Well were standing out in the open, as the chains of Worm soldiers passed between them. There seemed to be some manner of census going on, or at least Atraea seemed to be flying here and there, trying to account for people.
Che expected to see goods being brought from the forges: weapons or armour or metal ingots, such as Messel had mentioned. Or else food: Atraea had been worried about something more than simply not making quota, surely? Was Cold Well going to starve in order to load the tables of the Worm?
‘Cages.’ Esmail was beside her, crouching low; she had not realized he was still at the cave mouth until he spoke to her. She saw what he had seen: there were Mole Crickets and a few Beetles up at the lip of the cliff, overlooking the whole of Cold Well, and they were lowering angular lattices of chitin struts on ropes.
‘Containers, for the tax,’ Che corrected, desperately. ‘Not cages.’
There was activity from further away down the chasm of Cold Well, where the cages had already descended. It was coming closer. She could hear the sobbing and crying start up again.
‘Cages,’ repeated Esmail grimly.
‘But they’re so small . . .’ Che started, and at last her eyes could hide it from her no longer. She watched as a Beetle woman held up a child of no more than two, tears running down her face. A soldier of the Worm snatched the infant from her and passed it back down the chain towards one cage, in which another two children already crouched, crying, arms thrust through the gaps towards their helpless parents.
‘They’re just . . . handing them over,’ Che whispered. She saw plenty of reluctance, even some fights between parents before the inevitable surrender, but as the Worm passed through the people of Cold Well, they were making that impossible choice. Each family was selecting its least favourite son for the cull, offering up its own flesh and blood to the Worm.
‘How can they? They’re . . . it’s monstrous,’ she got out.
‘A thousand years of defeat and resignation.’ Esmail the killer, the assassin by birth, sounded just as sick and shaken as she. ‘They are shackled, body and mind.’
She saw Darmeyr Forge-Iron, who could have broken any of the Worm soldiers in two with his bare hands and hurled the pieces into the chasm. She saw him stare down at them, and his great frame trembled. There was a woman behind him – his mate, no doubt, and as large and powerful as he – and they had three children clustered close at their feet, a girl and two boys, hiding their faces in their mother’s skirts.
‘No,’ Che whispered, but the Worm was demanding, through the scarred priest its mouthpiece, and huge Darmeyr was turning to his children, his expression fixed and dreadful.
His hand fell on the youngest of his sons, and his wife was shaking her head, but it was plain she had no answer to his blunt question: What other choice?
So many children here – and so many of the women already growing round again with child, now she looked for it – and yet so few of four years or more. Cold Well had another resource for the Worm beyond weapons or smelted ore.
The chasm was a cacophony of screeching infants separated from all that they knew, of children just old enough to realize what they had lost in being taken from the hands of their parents and shoved into jagged cages by the soldiers of the Worm. Che did not even ask herself what this was in aid of, what need the Worm had for such a sacrifice. There were no reasons that she could ever want to know.
She saw Darmeyr take his son in his hands and hold him up, looking into the child’s screwed-up face, and she could not stop herself.
In the aftermath of her cry, which had cut through even that loaded and busy air, she now had the attention of the Worm.
‘Go!’ Esmail hissed, about to take off along the wall back the way they had come, but the Worm were there also – all of them roused in that one moment, all of them coursing up the sides of Cold Well towards them. ‘In!’ the assassin decided, pushing Che back into Atraea’s cave mouth. ‘In, and hope these tunnels go somewhere useful.’