‘Are you . . . the Worm?’ She had meant to say ‘of the Worm’ but the way the words came out seemed more fitting.
He shook his head, his blind attention plumbing unseen vistas. ‘Messel,’ he said in that rich voice. ‘Messel the hunted. Messel who would not work. Messel the kinless, the cursed.’
‘And you are of this Cold Well.’
‘Once.’
Che let her Art lapse, so that the darkness rushed back on her like a tide, obliterating all she saw of the land beyond. She had the measure of her own sight, though, and after a while her eyes adjusted, and she could see a faint suggestion of light from what Messel had just named Cold Well. Even the prisoners of this tomb felt the chilclass="underline" there was a scatter of fire over there, though what it was they burned in this place she could not guess.
She turned her face upwards and then clutched abruptly at Maure’s arm. ‘There are stars! The sky . . . we can just fly out?’
A long pause from the other two, and then Maure’s subdued response: ‘They’re not stars.’
‘They dwell above. Their lights lure the unwary who tread the air above us, insects, men too. All who are drawn to the lights are devoured,’ Messel intoned softly. ‘Those that tell the story that says we were not always here, that we came here from another place, a place of light – not my kinden, but I have heard the tale – they say that the ceiling-dwellers were placed there so that none could even search for a way back out. For me, I never believed in such things.’ And of course, whether he tilted his head towards the distant ceiling or towards the night sky itself, he would see no stars.
Che felt a hand clasp her arm, and then Maure was leaning into her, trembling slightly. ‘There are no dead here, Che,’ she whispered. ‘No loose spirits, no pieces of the slain. They all go. They all go to the Worm.’
Che shuddered, and for a long time she just sat there, a comforting arm about the halfbreed magician, staring up into that closed and hungry sky.
Two
‘It’s getting to the point where we’re either going to have to risk Imperial displeasure by kicking them out, or arrange for an accident,’ Totho commented.
‘You think our guests are outstaying their welcome?’ Drephos’s tone was dry, amused. ‘Unfortunately, the Empire remains a source of patronage, even if we are looking further afield for trading partners these days. If that means we must deal with Consortium spies pretending to be merchants, then so be it. Turning them away is not yet an option.’
Colonel-Auxillian Drephos, master artificer of the weapons trade, dwelt in no palace or great hall, nor even in a well-appointed townhouse such as the Solarnese might favour. His rooms were small, uncluttered and poorly lit. A moderately successful merchant’s factor would turn his nose up at them. He lived mostly in his workshops, though. He slept only a handful of hours a night, if that, and could see perfectly in the dark. It was a familiar occurrence for Totho to enter the workshops and find his master working through the small hours, surrounded by fragments of clockwork and oblivious to the passage of time.
Of course Totho worked at odd hours too, whenever inspiration struck. The only difference was that he had to bring a lamp with him.
‘Well, if we can’t officially show our displeasure, what if one of them got his prying hands caught? Poking around in someone else’s work can be a dangerous business if you don’t understand the principles involved.’
Around them, the machines stood silent, ready to stamp, press, mould and cut. Schematics for half a dozen inventions-in-progress were tacked up on boards all around them. Both of them had particular projects that they were devoting their time to, but the ideas would keep coming nonetheless, to be hastily scribed down for later use.
‘If it would make you happy,’ Drephos replied indulgently. ‘I admit, they have been growing somewhat insistent recently.’
The factories of the Iron Glove in Chasme lay just across the Exalsee from Solarno, seat of the nearest Imperial presence. That sea, and half of that city, was firmly in the hands of the Spiderlands Aristoi, and yet the Empire’s mercantile Consortium still paid its visits. The Glove had not been free of them for months now. Oh, they brought sacks of money, new commissions and orders, but they also had other agendas. At least half of those supposed diplomats and artificers and traders who walked in under the Black and Gold took considerable liberties with a guest’s access to the premises. They were hunting for secrets, and no doubt seized greedily on any scraps of thought that Totho and Drephos left lying around.
More recently, though – ever since the Glove’s two founding members had paid a visit to Capitas – they had been aware that the Consortium, and through it the Empire itself, had something specific in mind.
It did not exist, Drephos had assured them. The complex alchemical formula they asked after had been lost in the confusion of the last war’s end. Drephos himself had come out of that war as both a deserter and an invalid. Small surprise, then, if some of his secrets had fallen from the fingers of his broken metal hand, which Totho had since repaired.
And of course they then asked if he could recreate the substance, and he had confirmed he could not. The poison they called the Bee-killer had been the work of two protégés of his who had taken their own lives when it became evident what the Empire wanted their work for. Drephos himself was not a good enough chemical engineer to follow in their footsteps. He preferred working with metal, after all.
At which the Consortium men nodded and muttered and shrugged – and in their hearts they did not believe him.
The latest pack of them had been due to depart a few days ago, but had now stretched their welcome to breaking point, and every night one or other of them had been spotted creeping about the corridors of the workshop, hunting for the supposed secret. And it was certainly there, Totho knew full well. Of course Drephos had the formula for the Bee-killer, the city-devouring poison gas that Totho himself had unleashed on the Imperial garrison at Szar. After all, Drephos’s business – his obsession – was with tools of destruction. He had no other reason to exist.
And yet the Consortium asked and asked again, and Drephos put them off.
Totho remembered a conversation with his master, looking out over the city of Szar. It had been the night before the Bee-killer – unnamed at that time – was to be unleashed on the rebels there: a grand statement of the Empire’s ruthless use of power, a lesson to all others who dared to rise up. Drephos had argued that the lethal gas was simply the continuation of war, inevitable and even desirable, the furtherance of his craft. Totho had been half convinced. Circumstances had forced his hand, though. They had fought, the two artificers, and Totho had won the fight but lost the argument. He had tested the weapon anyway, on the Wasps themselves. That final show of dedication to his trade, Totho suspected, had healed the rift between him and Drephos as if it had never been. The Colonel-Auxillian was a man to whom moral principles were a closed book, but that cut every way – it made no difference to him who the Bee-killer killed, so long as it worked.