Messel laid a fire, with plenty of nervous glances at the cave’s owner, who sat on a rock staring at nothing, as though trying to wish all his uninvited guests out of existence. Orothellin was the only one his small pupils lit on, ignoring all the rest as if they were hallucinations until Thalric had kindled the blaze with sparks from his steel lighter.
The Hermit stretched his hands out carefully, as though rediscovering how close he could bring them to the flames. For a long time further he just stared at nothing, his Worm’s face set into a faint frown that was nevertheless a library of expression compared to those of his kin that they had just fought.
At last: ‘Someone, say something,’ from Thalric.
‘I don’t seek visitors.’ The voice of the Hermit was surprisingly strong, a College master or military officer turned gravelly with age, but not lacking in authority.
‘Not even visitors from the Old World?’ Orothellin prompted. He and the Hermit, sitting near to one another, had a curious sort of commonality, Tynisa decided. A pair of freaks with no place in this freak-show world.
The Hermit made a disparaging sound. ‘Is that so?’
‘Place them for me, then,’ the Slug-kinden challenged him mildly. ‘Where are they from?’
‘Do I care?’
‘Excuse me, Master Hermit,’ Che, of course painstakingly polite. ‘What are you to the Worm?’
At that he turned to her, seeming to acknowledge her presence for the first time. ‘A loose limb it doesn’t realize it’s missing. What are you?’
Che opened her mouth, and Tynisa saw quite clearly that she had no answer any more. The ready responses that she would have owned to under the sun outside had been stripped from her.
‘She is a scholar of Collegium.’ The words came to Tynisa quite readily. ‘A freer of slaves, caller of ghosts, speaker of words.’
The moment teetered on the edge of solemnity before Thalric put in, ‘Too many words, mostly.’
‘And the rest of you?’
‘Her followers,’ Tynisa stated, and Esmail said, ‘Her creatures,’ at the same time, prompting a surprised look from the others.
Esmail faced up to them boldly. ‘I have had many masters in my time. I want to return to my home, to my family. I see no way to do so, but she does. If we must fight the Worm to do so, then so be it.’
Che glanced anxiously to see the Hermit’s reaction to that, to see if he had some residual loyalty to the people – or the entity – he had apparently abandoned. For a moment his pale face screwed up, then it relaxed, lines of character springing away into nothing.
‘I have lived free of the Worm this long by avoiding its notice, just as Orothellin has. The Worm need only glance my way, recall that I was once a segment of its body, and I do not know if I would have the strength to refuse it a second time.’
‘We do not come to ask you to fight. We ask you to teach us. We need to understand the Worm,’ Che told him. ‘I know that your kinden were not like this when they were sealed here.’
‘Oh, you know, do you?’ The Hermit stared at her. ‘And what do you know, Beetle-kinden?’
‘They were a power of the Old World,’ she replied. ‘They were magicians. They sought to remake the world in their image, somehow. That much I know. The other great kinden united against them and defeated them, and such was their fear that your people might return to contest possession of the world again, that the Moths and the others made a terrible choice.’
‘Feh.’ The Hermit spat into the fire. ‘You know more than I.’
‘But what I have seen here is not the Worm of those memories,’ Che insisted. ‘I need you to tell me.’
‘Do you?’
She glanced at the Slug, who seemed halfway to dozing off. ‘Orothellin says—’
‘Does he? And what is she to you, Orothellin. Why bring her here? What’s the point?’
The huge man opened one eye. ‘Is that a new version of your asking me why I’m still alive?’
‘If you choose.’
‘I have hope still. Even after so very long, I have not lost hope.’
Another derisive sound from the Hermit.
‘And I will help her, help all of them, when they go to fight the Worm. When they go to my poor people here, the slaves and the victims, I will speak for them.’
The Hermit was looking into the fire again. ‘And you will come to the notice of the Worm at last, old fool.’
‘It seems likely.’
The old man spat and turned away – from Orothellin, from Che, from the world.
Later, when the others were sleeping, Che found herself awake, staring at the ceiling of the cave, calling on her Art to see, then banishing it again, swapping between a world of black and a world composed of shades of grey.
Their host was not with them, she realized. Thalric lay beside her, and Tynisa a sword’s length beyond him. Esmail was a curled shape across the fire from her, still keeping his secrets. Towards the back of the cave, Messel lay with his blank face turned towards her; impossible to know if he slept or not.
And yet she heard the murmur of voices, and where now was Orothellin’s great mounded form? At that, she knew she must have slept a while, because the big man could not have crept past her unobserved when she was awake.
Careful not to wake Thalric, she inched towards the cave mouth, straining her ears to catch their words.
‘You had no right,’ she heard the Hermit say.
A sigh from Orothellin, but no words.
‘I have been beyond its notice for so long. I do not know what I may become if I do this.’
‘I have faith in you,’ the Slug-kinden murmured.
‘What you are asking . . . I have no words. I would have to take her . . . How else can I make her understand that what she seeks cannot be done?’
‘Do you instead fear that perhaps it can be done?’ Che heard Orothellin prompt gently.
A fraught pause between the two unseen men, and then the Hermit was saying, ‘If I come to the attention of the Worm, if I cannot pass beneath its gaze, if the other Scarred Ones recognize me . . .’
‘You have often said that you have lived too long.’
‘Easy for you to say!’ An old man’s bitter curse.
‘That’s well – for that is what I am saying.’
Hearing those words, Che did not understand what Orothellin meant, but it was plain that the Hermit did. The silence that followed had a different quality, until eventually he said, ‘You cannot mean it. You intend to remedy that drawn-out thread you call a life, do you?’
‘If not for this, then what?’
‘For this girl? This Beetle child?’
Another enormous sigh from Orothellin, and Che had the distinct sense that he knew she was eavesdropping. ‘The greatest failure of my people was ever their refusal to acknowledge this: that all things end. And this place, this prison for the Worm, it ends too, and the Worm plans to be outside, and what it leaves behind here will be picked-over corpses in the hollow scoured-out shell that it has hatched from. What have I preserved myself for? Life for its own sake, or a life with meaning? If any of my works are to have meaning, then this is the time . . . the time to give everything.’
‘You could at least have the decency to outlive me!’ Che heard their host snap. ‘You made me, you fat waste of breath. You taught me to be this useless thing I am now. You took me from the Worm . . . I am your whim, your experiment.’ The Hermit had looked the older of the two, but Che was forced to remind herself that, of course, the former Master of Khanaphes predated this entire world that they were trapped in.