He flexed his fingers, shrugged his shoulders. He wore a leather cuirass under his tunic, and it might deflect the fire of a stingshot, if he was lucky. Vrakir, on the other hand, looked unarmoured.
‘Get out, all of you,’ he murmured.
‘General—?’
‘All of you, out now. Out into the next room, but wait for my shout.’ Because if he is quicker than me, then by the Empress I’ll trust you to kill him before he can get out of this place. ‘You too, Captain Bergild.’
The woman looked as though she wanted to protest, which Tynan found oddly touching, but in the end she left along with the rest of them.
Tynan slid one foot back for better balance, waiting for the first sign that Vrakir might go for him. He was a loyal servant of the Empire, was Tynan. He would not strike first.
Instead, the Red Watch officer reached into his tunic, the least threatening gesture a Wasp could make, and drew out a scroll.
‘Orders, General,’ he said quietly. ‘These airships brought orders.’
‘That’s a lot of hold space for one piece of paper,’ Tynan remarked. Vrakir was pointedly still at attention – a hard pose to launch a surprise attack from, which was probably the original point of it. Unwillingly, Tynan stepped forwards and snatched the scroll that Vrakir proffered.
Tynan retreated again, unrolling it, noting the seals: no strange intuitions of the Red Watch this time. The Empress herself had held this paper and given it her mark.
He scanned the few lines written there, feeling a weird sense that he had done this all before.
‘This is . . .’
‘We should begin loading immediately, General,’ Vrakir confirmed.
Loading, yes, but not with the soldiers of the Second, who were hereby commanded to hold Collegium against all comers. No last-minute escape for Tynan’s boys if things go bad, instead . . .
‘What is this?’ Tynan demanded, crumpling the scroll.
‘Orders, General,’ Vrakir said again. ‘We have three score Slave Corps to deal with the logistics, but we should . . .’
‘Major Vrakir, we don’t have anywhere like this number of Collegiates in the cells, never mind whether any of them are Inapt or not. This simply isn’t—’
‘General, the Empress is not looking for criminals or seditionists or rebels. She simply seeks slaves. I will give the necessary orders to begin rounding up the local population. We have lost one airship, but the slavers reckon we should be able to fit almost a thousand in the hold of each surviving vessel, if they pack them tight.’
‘What is this all about, Vrakir?’ Tynan demanded.
‘The Empress’s will, sir,’ Vrakir replied, while his expression said eloquently, I don’t know. I do not know.
Twenty
‘First,’ said the Hermit, ‘we must prepare.’ He stared into Che’s eyes, as though trying to startle into the open the fear he plainly thought should be there.
She met his gaze evenly, if only because his eyes were relatably human. They had less of the Worm’s taint than his other features.
‘You cannot just go to the Worm. You cannot see what the Worm is, not a stranger like you,’ he went on. ‘The Worm knows its own, yes, it does. And you are not. You will be—’
‘But you have a way,’ Che cut him off. She was very aware of her companions watching all this. Despite the gravity of the situation, she was beginning to feel slightly ridiculous with this man prattling on.
Abruptly there was a knife in his hand, a curved blade most of a foot long, and he had latched on to her wrist, dragging her close again when she tried to pull away. He was stronger than he had any right to be.
Hearing the sudden scuffle, she knew that Thalric would have one palm thrust forwards, with Tynisa’s rapier whispering from its sheath. Her eyes were on the knife, though, and she could not work her throat sufficiently to tell them to stand down.
Instead, it was Orothellin’s voice booming, ‘Wait!’ the echo of it rolling about the cave. ‘It must be this way.’
Che felt the tension waver in its balance, because the old Master of Khanaphes did not command that sort of authority, and the Hermit’s expression offered no reassurance at all.
Her heart was hammering, but she studied the old man, his pallid skin cicatrized with those twisted spirals. ‘The mark of the Worm,’ she got out.
His smile was vicious. ‘As you say. Are you regretting your decision yet?’
Yes. Because what she did here now would mark her permanently, and not just her flesh. She was being inducted into a terrible mystery, the touch of which would stain her forever.
The Hermit’s grin was spreading as he saw her falter, and sheer obstinacy did the rest.
‘Do it.’ She bared one arm for him, right up to the shoulder. This is the price I pay, or the first instalment of that price. I have set my course and I shall follow it, come what will.
He rested his blade on her skin, pausing a moment as though working out the precise movement in advance, and then drawing the keen edge across her skin with a twisting circular motion of his wrist.
She hissed pain through her teeth, eyes clenched shut against it, suppressing the cry. The sickness inside was worse, though: the corruption that bled in just as her blood welled out, and she knew she had consented to a terrible thing. But she wanted knowledge, and every tale of the Bad Old Days made clear that knowledge was only had for a price – and at least she had known beforehand what coin she would be paying in.
Then the Hermit was swabbing at the wound – which hurt more than the cut – and considering his handiwork.
‘Not quite, no, not quite,’ he muttered, and she felt Thalric’s hand in hers, giving her something to clench on as the Hermit picked and cut shallow hatches and lines, and then as he rubbed something gritty and stinging into the bloody gashes, his fingers wet to the knuckles with her blood. The burning pain of his work seemed to go on forever, and reach right to her core, the actual wound itself a mere abstraction.
‘It mustn’t heal. You’ll have it for life, yes indeed,’ the Hermit muttered. ‘And, even then, it won’t last you for long. This doesn’t make you one with the Worm. You’ll not walk in its shadow for long, with just this little scratch, no, no.’ Another vile grin. ‘Though you’ll have this to remember us by, oh yes, you will.’
She could see more than a dozen such scars on his own skin, and that counted only those parts of his dirty, pasty hide that were exposed.
‘Now you’re ready, eh?’ And the grin had become a glower, as though he had been forced to do all this at knife point. ‘Now you’ll see – and you’ll be sorry.’
‘Old man,’ Esmail broke in, ‘give me a scar to match hers.’
‘I’m not taking two!’ the Hermit spat.
‘Perhaps I’ll walk that way on my own,’ the Assassin replied.
The Hermit chuckled bitterly. ‘This one, I’ll take her, but if she strays from my heels, that little mark won’t save her. She must be marked, yes, but even then her life is bound to me. I was born of the Worm, at least. She can hide in my shadow. You will not pass for the Worm without me.’