‘Will you help me?’ she asked him. ‘A ritual to breach this place for just a moment? With the Seal cracked through, and with our combined strength, it may be possible – just for the moment it takes for us to step out.’
‘This is not what the Worm does.’
‘But it will give the same result. What the Worm showed me was that it is possible.’
Che looked about at her friends: Tynisa and Thalric plainly willing to trust her and follow her wherever she went; Esmail suspicious; Maure sunk in misery, her arms clasped about herself. ‘I have no other plan, and I cannot do it alone.’
Orothellin sighed. ‘I am sorry,’ he murmured, and for a plunging moment Che thought he was speaking to her, that he would deny her, or deny that the venture could ever succeed.
But it was Messel who shrugged awkwardly, and Che looked between them, uncertain what was being apologized for.
Then Orothellin said, ‘Let us at least make the attempt.’ And she forgot about everything else.
‘Maure, you’re a better ritualist than I am,’ she directed. ‘Let’s give ourselves the best chance. What have you got?’
They made a fire, and Maure set out her candles and her herbs, emptying her pack of all the paraphernalia her trade made use of. She drew symbols in chalk on the rock floor of their cave, descendants of the ancient glyphs of Khanaphes, as passed down from mentor to apprentice over the centuries, their true meaning lost.
Save to Orothellin, of course, who studied them curiously, altering each one minutely when he thought Maure was not looking.
‘This will not work, of course,’ he whispered to Che, whilst Maure continued working herself into a frenzy of preparation.
‘Is she . . .?’
‘She prepares as well as anyone can, but we do not have the strength,’ he told her sadly. ‘That little you have come back with is nothing, while I have next to nothing – the last dregs of my craft from a thousand years ago, all this place has left me with.’
‘We have to try.’
He shrugged massively. ‘I suppose you do.’
‘Ready!’ Maure turned, hands clasped before her. Her eyes were mutely pleading, Please let this work. Please let us get out of here.
‘Form a circle,’ Che advised. ‘Just . . . kneel down and keep quiet. Unless there’s anything you can give . . .?’ She cocked an eyebrow at Esmail, who shrugged.
‘Come on, then.’ She took Thalric’s hand in her left, feeling the rough calluses there. He was an Apt man in the circle of a ritual, an utter dead weight, but she would bring him out of this place; she would bring them all out. And then let the Worm beware. She would find some way of locking them back in their tomb – of recreating the Seal that had formerly banished them.
Orothellin sat down across the circle heavily. He took Maure’s and Esmail’s hands as Che took Tynisa’s in her right, the circle joining link by link.
The Slug-kinden, the former Master of Khanaphes, looked over his shoulder at Messel lurking unhappily at the back. ‘Never fear,’ Che heard the big man murmur. ‘I will be here still. I’m not going anywhere.’
Che felt her mind enclosed in the shell that was the Worm’s prison, the curved-away world that the Moths’ great ritual had made of their underground fastness. She felt as though she was scrabbling at its inner surface, unable to gain purchase on it when she needed to rip and tear her way out. Still, she had some strength to spend now, if she could but muster it. Then perhaps, just perhaps . . .
Maure opened to her: the halfbreed woman had a thimble of power she had somehow hung on to in the face of the Worm, and it came now to Che across the bridge of clasped hands. Within it was that spark she had gained from Orothellin, given to Che guilelessly, desperately. Esmail, too – a weak magician but one whose power was only ever used on himself, and less amenable to being siphoned away. He gave to her willingly, to her surprise. It was the first time she had had any real sense of him as a person since their banishment, feeling the economic strength of purpose that moved him, willing to do whatever it took to get home. From Thalric, nothing, of course. From Tynisa, some wretched thread, but Che’s sister had no training, no way to make real use of what little magic she had: the magic of her sword and her badge.
From Orothellin . . . she sensed a great reluctance there, a man who had been holding on to his strength for so long. But it was more than mere habit. Once he had given this all up to send them on their way, she saw how he would be unable to hide forever. The Worm would catch him, tomorrow or in a hundred days, or a thousand. His long, dragging life would at last be brought to an end.
And more: his charges, his students, those he had exiled himself to help. He was abandoning them in helping Che, turning his back on Messel and all the other slaves of the Worm.
Then why help? Che asked him.
Because what have I accomplished in all that time save be a witness to their losses, the price of living with the Worm? You are right. You, at least, should escape this place.
And he gave her all the power he had, a great tide of it like the river Jamail in flood, eclipsing Maure and Esmail’s meagre contributions, and Che took it all in, held it in her mind and opened the gates of her power.
Out. We are getting out right now.
Because this place was not a physical place, and it had no fixed connections to the world beyond, there was no gateway to journey to, no portal to unlock. The exit was everywhere and nowhere. It was wherever someone tore a hole, whether that someone was the Worm using the Worm’s ways, or whether it was a desperate Beetle magician.
She shaped her power like a knife in her mind, making the substance of the world around her like taut cloth.
Time and strength enough for one strike.
She felt the hands of all of them on the hilt of the knife, Orothellin’s most of all, a thousand years of skill to cut just so.
I want to see the sun, and I will see it.
They struck together, and she felt the walls of the Worm’s domain stretch and protest, the ancient Moth ritual that had made it was fighting her, even as the power she expended bled out into the abyss.
More! Drawing on them, leaching their strength, clawing at their very breath, feeling that imaginary knife shake and shudder as its tip grated across the walls of the world. More! A desperate plea, ransacking everything she had within her, all that unasked and unearned power that had been thrown on her shoulders by the Darakyon, by the Masters of Khanaphes. It must be good for something, or what was it all for?
And it was not enough. They began falling back, all that hard-won strength haemorrhaging into the cold void; Che lunged for something more, and in a moment she found it.
Give! she insisted, and only realized afterwards whom she was demanding this of. For one moment her mind touched her sister’s – not Tynisa, whom she had grown up with, but that other sister that fate had thrust upon her. Seda, the Empress, her enemy.
That thin cord still linked them, the bond of their shared throne, the mocking curse of Khanaphes.
And Seda gave. There was little enough that she could force through that tenuous link, but what she could, she gave, and Che felt that knife-point scrape and dig—