She fell into darkness, too far from the dropped torch to see, a drawback the Worm would not have.
‘Thalric!’ Most unlikely of allies, given their past enmity, but he was casting his second torch ahead of her so that she scrabbled to a halt in its pool of light, lurching to her feet, blade first, to meet them.
A sudden movement at the back of that chain of bodies and their end segment was a corpse – all too fast for Tynisa to follow but she knew it must be Esmail. For a moment the Worm recoiled, its many bodies reforming, and then she had half a dozen pressing her, the rest hunting off into the dark.
Thalric was overhead now, but his stings were lancing beyond her, trying to kill the slingers who remained the only threat to him. She was on her own.
She had the advantage of reach, and it nearly killed her. She took the initiative, expecting defence, but killed one of them straight off and was immediately swamped by the rest – no holding back, no fear of death, and yet a mindless discipline to them, so that every set of blades sought to drive her onto the points of their comrades.
In that moment she took a couple of cuts, shallow but survivable, and drew strength from her blade to ignore the pain, cutting another throat as she did so, falling back to keep them at the point of her blade.
For a second they were stilled, as whatever mind lurked behind those faces readjusted, and then pain assailed her, got its jaws into her and would not let go.
The crippling injury that she had taken in the Commonweal, which dropped from her as soon as she had need to draw her blade, was abruptly again an inseparable part of her, as impossible to deny as her Weaponsmaster’s magic was to believe. The hand of the Worm fell upon her, and she could draw no support from the blade in her hand. It was just a sword, a thing of craft and steel. She was just a swordswoman, and the badge she wore was just an ornament.
She fell back a step and the tightness of that scarred wound caught at her, till she fell.
They pounced on her, but the broken ground came to her rescue, sending her slipping and slithering away from the light faster than they could follow, hunched about the pain of her overstretched hip.
This isn’t how I die! But, amid that agony, she could only wonder how she had lived so long. The blackness around her was almost total. She could hear the quick patter of their feet but realized she would never see the killing stroke.
Then there was a flash, like lightning, imprinting those rushing figures on to her eyes – Thalric’s sting, gone very wide but still a moment’s vision for her, and she cried out, ‘Again!’
He obliged, the flash and flare of his stingshot dancing about the oncoming soldiers of the Worm as though he were an artillerist trying to find the proper range. In the second of those brief gifts of light, she saw Esmail in the midst of them, bare-handed, the severed halves of a sundered sword blade spinning away to either side of him as he plunged his fingers through one enemy’s breastplate as though it was not there.
Another ran straight onto her blade, and then she was moving and scrabbling as best she could to get out from underneath their blows, but there seemed only a handful now, and at last Thalric was catching them, using each blast to light the way towards the next, missing Esmail by inches.
And they were gone. No more Worm, and she heard Thalric hiss her name as he landed, all three of them once more utterly blind.
‘We must move now. Those that came for me are still out there somewhere,’ Esmail stated calmly. ‘Take my hand.’
She expected to feel something edged and deadly, but when his fingers found her they were flesh and blood, and she leant heavily on him as he hauled her up.
‘You’re hurt?’ from Thalric, hearing her curse.
‘I’ll live. But what now?’
‘Look up,’ Esmail told them.
Far above them, across an insuperable void of darkness, was one of Thalric’s dropped torches.
‘We go up,’ Thalric agreed, and then the two of them were helping her as they all clambered desperately for the higher ground.
It fell to Messel to lead them to where the others were: Che, Orothellin and the Hermit, and none of those three needed a glimmer of light. Tynisa allowed herself one uncharitable thought: If her eyes were like mine, then she’d be out under the sun and Maure’d still be here.
‘This Hermit, or Cursed One, or whatever,’ she heard Thalric growl. ‘What is he? Why’s he so important. Why do we trust him?’
‘I do not trust him,’ was Messel’s reassuring reply, and then, ‘but we are here.’
‘Last torch,’ the Wasp remarked philosophically, ‘and I don’t reckon this Hermit has the makings of a fire.’
‘I’ll find something for you to burn,’ the blind man offered immediately, and then he was gone, leaving them in the utter dark before anyone could call him back.
‘What . . .?’ Thalric asked plaintively.
‘I suspect not because he suddenly feels the cold,’ was Esmail’s dry observation.
‘He is right not to trust me.’
A lot of silence followed the sound of that new voice.
‘How are we supposed to take that?’ Tynisa enquired levelly. ‘Che, are you there?’
Her sister answered, but Thalric spoke over her. ‘Now for the torch.’ And then his sting flashed and flared.
Tynisa’s eyes were only for Che, seeing her safe there with the towering presence of Orothellin behind her. Thalric saw the new addition first, and he dropped Tynisa instantly, springing backwards into the air with a hand extended.
‘Thalric, wait!’ Che told him.
‘He’s one of them!’ he yelled back.
Tynisa was leaning heavily on Esmail, gingerly feeling out how much weight her hip could take. She could stand again, now, but lodged like a splinter in her mind was the understanding that her body could fail her at any moment.
She looked at the apparition before them. Thalric was right: he was of the Worm.
She saw that same pallid skin and grey-shaded eyes they all possessed. He was old, though, and he bore those spiralling scars she had seen on the Worm’s spokesman at Cold Well. His colourless hair was long and dirty, hanging past his shoulders, and he wore a ragged robe of many stitched-together pieces of hide and fur and chitin, its poor fit making his body shapeless. Moreover, a human animation possessed his face, though in a weak and sickly way. He looked ill, like a man pining for some drink or drug.
‘What’s going on?’ Tynisa asked. Their shadows swooped around them as Thalric touched down behind her, no doubt his hand still directed at the stranger.
‘He can keep the Worm from finding us, because he is of the Worm already,’ Esmail stated. ‘Explain, quickly.’
Orothellin sighed. ‘He the only one I know who has turned from the Worm.’ He shrugged broadly. ‘Either you will come with us and talk, and have some trust, or you will go.’
There was a scattering of exchanged glances.
‘I’m with Messel,’ Thalric grumbled, but it was plain that Che had already made up her mind. After all, how better to learn about the Worm than from this creature here?
The Hermit dwelt within a cave that stank of him: a thin, sour reek, the taint of an unwashed body that was not quite human, even though it had come a long way towards that goal. That the place seemed hostile to human life merely placed it alongside almost everything Tynisa had seen down here so far. It was an oppressive thing to look out of the cave mouth and see a darkness that cared nothing for night and day, enlivened only by those false, murderous stars.