‘Yes, that is what it is like,’ she whispered, and she felt shaken. She had thought that this place, locked away from the magic of the world by its Moth creators, had emptied itself of magic, leaving no clay for her mind to sculpt with. That should not affect Thalric, though.
It is the Worm, she understood. It is not this place, it is the Worm itself. What has it become?
‘You still have your Art,’ she told Thalric, although the words came out as more of a question than she had meant.
‘For what it’s worth,’ he confirmed.
‘I’m going to fight the Worm,’ she told him. ‘I want you to help me. I’m going to start a revolution.’
‘That’s it, then, is it?’ he demanded. ‘We’re here for the duration, fighting in the pits until we die?’
‘If there is a way out now, it is over the defeated body of the Worm.’
His face turned, hunting the dark in search of her, and she reached out for him – catching his hand first, then pulling him close, putting her arms about him. ‘Please, Thalric,’ she breathed.
He held her gently enough, his head bowed over hers. ‘We always do seem to end up in dark places.’
The Empress Seda was reinventing magic.
This was her blessing and her curse, that she had been Apt, once.
She had never been tutored by great magicians or had anyone explain to her the shifting laws by which magic functioned. She had worked always from first principles, but hers was a quick and enquiring mind. She had tested her powers, working on the world and on the minds of those around them. She had already accomplished something unheard of with the Red Watch, a corps of the Apt suborned to serve as her senses and her voice, drawing on that ancestral Inapt spark they all kept hidden away. Was it something the Moth-kinden would think of? It was not, but of course they had Inapt servants aplenty that they could rely on.
She was trying to mend the world with broken tools.
But she had learned in logic classes how to test a theory, back when the world had been smaller and made more sense. Such methods made awkward bedfellows with magic, but she had no other way. She needed to be able to measure.
She could sense the Seal always now, her mind attuned to it. She could feel each spreading crack in it, sense every one of the smaller seals and bans as they shattered one by one. Daily, even hourly, her Red Watch brought her word of every Worm incursion, reports coming in from across the Empire and beyond. She had a map that plotted them all, lines weaving and spiralling and connecting. It did not matter that her former self would not even have recognized it as a map.
If she stretched her mind as far as it would go, she could appreciate the pattern; she could begin to measure the approach of the Worm.
Knowing that, she had begun to devise a theoretical countermeasure.
Had she been Apt, then she would have calculated, abacus in hand, and filled pages with her equations, charts, graphs – all impossible to comprehend in her current state. As it was, she had a whole book of diagrams, sigils, glyphs, the ideograms of an Inapt calculus that perfectly described everything she had uncovered about the Worm, its spread, its paths into the world, her projections for its complete emergence.
Had a Moth Skryre looked over that book, he would have understood completely and been horrified and shocked. Perhaps even now there were Moths working on exactly the same calculations, coming to the same terrible conclusions. Although probably not to her final conclusion. The Moths had been a race conniving at their own extinction since the revolution. She was Wasp-kinden: she believed that all obstacles could be overcome.
With enough strength behind her, she could stop the Worm, renew the Seal, perhaps cut off its bleak and terrible home from the world forever. Her magic had always been one of brute might – those were the cards she had been dealt – and now it was raw strength that the world needed.
She knew that she would get one chance only. If she tried but lacked sufficient power, then what she spent would be wasted, and, once wasted, that power would never come again. Experimentation was therefore needed to work out just what she would be required to do, how far she must go.
‘Tisamon,’ she directed, ‘when you are ready.’
They were in the Mantis room of the Imperial museum, that hidden nook with its walls covered in vines and dead branches, standing before the great worm-ridden idol ripped from its place in the Commonweal as a war trophy, and now returned to its original purpose: a focus for a very specific form of magic.
Tisamon’s armoured form remained still, because such things were not hurried. The revenant Weaponsmaster, another of her grand magical triumphs, had his metal claw folded back along his arm as he regarded the slave before him. She was an old Grasshopper woman, some skivvy that nobody would miss or care about, just a worn-out menial at the end of her useful life.
But Seda had one use left for her. This woman was about to provide a great service to magical theory.
She was tied to the idol and, although she had probably been amongst the Apt for decades, she knew exactly what was going on. Seda had ordered her gagged, because her screaming had become a distraction, and still those muffled, desperate sounds issued from her.
I envy you your ignorance of why this is necessary, the Empress considered. But if you knew how important this was, you would understand. This is for everyone. This is to save the world.
Tisamon brought the blade of his claw to the old woman’s chin, tilting her head back. Seda saw her eyes try to seek out those of her killer, to appeal to some common humanity between them, but of course there was nothing there. His pale dead face had been short on empathy even while he lived.
Still, she almost saw tenderness in him as his off-hand touched the woman’s cheek, before forcing her chin up further, baring that wrinkled throat.
He angled the edge of his blade, so that the point was jutting down towards her collarbones, the line of it along her neck, then with a sudden, almost ecstatic motion, he cut her throat.
As he moved, Seda focused on the moment of death, the idol’s greedy drinking, drawing that release of power and turning it downwards, inwards, in whatever impossible direction it was that the Worm was approaching from. She felt the infinitesimal give – the tiny reaction to her sacrifice – that validated her calculations. It could be done. It must be done. She could put it all right.
Soon thereafter she had summoned General Brugan to attend her. She was beginning to tire of him, in truth. Something in him had broken when his conspiracy had been undone, when she had forced him to drink the blood of his comrades, and to watch his Rekef supplanted by her Red Watch. She had expected more of him. She remembered first setting eyes on him – so strong, so ruthless and determined. She barely called him to her bed any more. He had become a dull lover, too timorous to be satisfying.
She needed him and his Rekef now, though, because her Red Watch was simply not numerous enough for this task.
‘Brugan,’ she addressed him. She had chosen the throne room for this audience, hopeful that this reminder of the familiar ways of the Empire would put some steel back into him. He remained kneeling, though, barely able to look her in the face.
‘Inapt slaves, Brugan,’ she told him.
He glanced up briefly with red-lined eyes. He was drinking more than before, too. Really she should have found a replacement, but there was no time now. His lips moved, and she heard, ‘I will have some brought to you.’