But that’s mad; we’ll just get lost or— But there was Messel ahead of them, beckoning urgently. An expression had appeared on his eyeless face at last, screamed out by the set of his grimacing mouth: fear, terrible fear. His words of defiance were utterly gone.
‘Lead us!’ Thalric demanded, and the blind man shrugged past him, disappearing into the rear reaches of the cave and beyond, down into the warren of the mines.
‘No light.’ Esmail warned. ‘Hold to Maker, she can see. Beetle girl, you must go first.’
Logic roused her from her horror and she went rushing after Messel, terrified that he might already have taken one turn too many and be beyond her reach. He was waiting, though, and she caught up with him quickly, with Thalric hanging on to her shoulder, and Tynisa and Maure behind him. A hurried glance showed Esmail bringing up the rear, hands extended like weapons.
‘Quick quick quick,’ insisted Messel, and then he was gone again, and at a run that Che knew her stumbling charges could not match. She hauled them on at the best pace she could, and every time she thought that she had been abandoned, there the blind guide was waiting for her, his face twisted in fear.
She recalled the speed at which the soldiers of the Worm moved, how long it would take them to return to Atraea’s cave and how swiftly they would follow into the tunnels.
And where can these tunnels possibly lead us?
She knew she would barely even hear them approach before they caught up with Esmail, and the thought of even being that close to the Worm, with its horribly vacant human faces, made her weak with fear and revulsion.
Then there was a clatter and a thrashing, and she almost cried out at the sound.
‘One of their beasts,’ came Esmail’s tight, controlled voice. ‘Keep moving, whatever you do!’
‘They’re coming,’ whimpered Maure. ‘Oh, Che . . .!’
Was that a plea, or recrimination? You should not have followed me from the Commonweal. I have doomed us all.
Magic – surely I can find some magic . . . but it was like trying to wring water from stones, and the approaching Worm’s mere presence seemed to drive from her mind the faintest understanding of how she might even accomplish what she thought of as magic. That whole sense, that she had grown so accustomed to, had been put out like an eye.
Except . . .
One star remained in that sky, the thinnest thread back to that old life led under the sun. Seda, the Empress.
Her enemy, her sister and bitterest enemy, but the Worm was closer and closer, swifter and more sure than they could be in these confined and uneven tunnels, and Che would take anything at all now – anything to save herself and her friends.
She pulled, reaching across that immeasurable distance for aid of any sort, and it was given – a reflexive gout of strength, like a cup of water spilt on the desert sands.
Che took it in her hands and cast it at the Worm, anything to delay them, to buy another few moments without their attentions.
And nothing. Even as she cast it out, she lost the thoughts that would let her make use of it. Wasted – all that borrowed power, all she had; the simple presence of the Worm had deadened it to nothing.
Then she fell. Messel had descended a near-sheer drop of twenty feet without stopping, just crawling down the rock by his Art without ever thinking to warn her. Her wings snapped out as she dropped, and Thalric’s too, and the pair of them spiralled down, clutching at each other, into a wide mine gallery.
There were lights here – made of twined fungus like Thalric’s, and dim. The miners were all gone, though, summoned above to pay their tax to the Worm.
Messel was crouching, looking up. Maure had flown down, but Che saw Tynisa being supported by Esmail on the lip of the drop. Neither of them could fly.
‘Climb!’ she shouted, but she knew the Worm would climb down faster, and Tynisa seemed injured.
‘Just drop!’ Thalric shouted, and then he was kicking off, wings surging him upwards. Che saw him recoil as he reached the top, saw Tynisa’s blade out, the Worm surely almost on them. Then Thalric had grabbed the Weaponsmaster about the waist and just yanked her off the ledge, straining to slow their fall so that they crashed down almost at Che’s feet, bruised but alive.
‘Esmail—!’
But the assassin was already with them, falling on his feet, knees almost to his chin to absorb the shock of it, then turning to see the Worm moving down the cliff, descending almost as fast as they could run on level ground.
Gather, said a voice, and only a moment later did she realize it spoke directly into her head. It was a man’s voice, a tired voice but a strong one.
‘To me!’ Che hissed, and she dragged Esmail back even as he was weighing a throwing blade in one hand, then she clutched Maure closer with the other hand. The little knot of them drew close, defiant, blades out against the Worm.
A sense of calm touched Che, utterly incongruous in the circumstances but she saw that Maure felt it as well, and even Esmail.
‘Very still now,’ said that low, deep voice, in words they could all hear. A huge figure had joined them, stepping out from who knew where. Che’s eyes were fixed on the Worm as they reached the ground, those slack faces unreadable. She saw one huge pale hand from the corner of her eye, though, bearing a staff of black wood etched with countless tiny glyphs.
Messel’s Teacher had come, after all.
The man’s other hand, empty, was on the far side of them, so that their entire group fit within the curve of his arms, and Che could sense a vastly focused power at work – not strong but applied with a finesse and skill that could make her weep. It was not turned against the Worm, but focused inwards, drawing the darkness around them, turning the light away, until even the most dark-adapted eye would miss them.
The Worm had stopped, though nothing in all its faces or its bodies betrayed any emotion. Then it set off a little way, and halted once more, then back, as if making tentative searches for an enemy that had apparently been snatched away from it.
Che could hear the laboured breath of the giant newcomer, and she saw the hand holding the staff begin to shake. Without thinking, she placed her own there, and even though she had nothing she could give, the huge man seemed to take strength from that gesture.
Then the Worm was gone, its human segments retreating up the wall as quickly as they had come, heading elsewhere in their determined search.
The staff drooped, and their benefactor let out a sigh as big as himself. ‘We must go now. They’ll be back here very soon, searching for the trail. Oh, I have given too much, drunk a cupful out of a thimble.’
Thalric was already staring at the man, backing off slightly, and Che turned to see what had so startled him, craning upwards.
He was as big as a Mole Cricket, but without that broad strength, his frame instead a vast, sagging bulk within his patched and ragged robes. He was sickly pale, too, haggard and grey as though he was near death. Once upon a time his pouchy face would have radiated majesty. Che knew it – she could almost see him as he had once been, because she and Thalric had both encountered a great deal of his kin beneath the ancient city of Khanaphes. He was of their Masters, the Slug-kinden who had a claim on civilization to predate all others, who had beaten back the wilderness, raised the first cities, taught the younger kinden about law and craft and magic. Or so they claimed.
Having witnessed what he had just accomplished with so very, very little, she believed that.