Esmail considered this, his face a closed book to Che. Then he blinked and nodded. ‘I have made a livelihood of walking where I was not wanted, seeming what I was not. So, there is no magic here, and my old tricks won’t work, but the bulk of my training does not need a magician’s touch, and I’ll take whatever I can get. Cut me, old man.’
The Hermit’s eyes sought out Orothellin, who shrugged, plainly uncertain, but in the end Esmail endured the same ritual, gritting his teeth against it as the Hermit worried away at his arm. If he felt the depth of the taint, he did not show it. Perhaps it was only a little more darkness in an almost starless sky.
‘What will you do?’ Che asked Esmail, after it was done and he was nursing the wound.
He shrugged with his unmarred shoulder. ‘If you intend to accomplish anything here, and if I am to be of any use to you – if we are to see the sun again – then I play by whatever rules this place admits to. If there is an Emperor of Worms, I will walk into his palace and cut his throat.’
At that, the Hermit cackled, eyes bulging. ‘You’ll . . . aha no, no, you won’t. She’ll tell you, if she comes back. She’ll see, and she’ll tell you just why you can’t. Now come on, girl. It’s time we were gone.’
‘Orothellin has told me we were magicians, once.’ The Hermit had a surprising turn of speed for an old man, moving swiftly over the uneven ground, clambering here and there with the sureness of his Art, making Che work to keep up with him. ‘No more, though.’
‘I had thought you . . . or the others like you . . . the men with scars . . .’ she began uncertainly. ‘Are they not . . .?’ Ahead her eyes could make out the random clutter of the city of the Worm she had looked out over before. Until it had come into sight, the Hermit had just hunched alongside, practically ignoring her. Now it was as though the sight of his kin had opened a door within him, and the words came out.
‘No, magician is not the word for what they are, or for what I was,’ he grunted, hauling himself over a ledge, his staff clattering against the stone. He was making no attempt at stealth. ‘But we must keep clear of them. That mark on you, as well as my presence, these will let us pass the segments of the Worm – but the head has eyes, yes? The Scarred Ones, they will see you, and know you for an intruder, and then you will die. I will die, too, if they know me. We must avoid them.’
‘If not magicians, then what?’ Che demanded, out of breath with the constant scrabbling and climbing and bursts of flight.
He stopped abruptly. ‘You must not think in such terms. It will not help you where you’re going.’
‘So give me some new terms. Just tell me . . . I mean, what do you believe of magic? Are you Apt? Do you just think it’s nonsense?’ It struck her that here, where the magic just drained away like water out of cupped hands, it would be very easy to be Apt.
‘Magic is irrelevant. The work of the slaves, their devices and machines, that is irrelevant,’ the Hermit pronounced. ‘None of it matters in the face of god.’
Che stared at him, and the smile that broadened across his colourless face seemed only just this side of madness.
‘And the name for what they are – for what I was – is priest.’
‘I . . . don’t understand,’ she confessed.
‘No, you do not and you cannot, just as I cannot understand when Orothellin talks of magic. But I can show you, and then you will understand—’
‘And regret, yes,’ she finished for him testily.
They travelled in silence for a while, as the broken city expanded to fill the dark land ahead of them, but the Hermit kept glancing back, still trailing the threads of their conversation, and at last he said, ‘Orothellin told me we were magicians.’
‘So you said.’
‘But magic failed us. We fought our war, and lost, and came to this place, as you – so wise, yes – as you know. But magic was not enough, and we were imprisoned with our enemies, so many of them, our own slaves among them. And we needed some kind of strength that was not the strength of magicians nor the strength of slaves. So we found god. You’ll see.’
They were approaching a caravan of beasts: great armoured woodlice and millipedes burdened down with cages and sacks. The soldiers of the Worm were everywhere around it, but she saw slaves there, too, some bound, others walking freely alongside, no doubt to assist with the unloading. Why do they not resist? she found herself thinking, but she had seen this too many times before not to know the answer. Because collaboration spares them the whip or the tax or something similar. How cheaply lives are sold when slaves make their own shackles.
If she was to accomplish anything here, that collaboration would be her greatest foe: the habits of a thousand years of indenture would not be broken easily. Or perhaps at all.
As they crossed into the shadow of the buildings, the Hermit’s pace had become more cautious, and he was looking out for other Scarred Ones, holding her back whenever he saw one, skulking by walls, creeping across open spaces, every clumsily underhand movement seeming to scream out to Che that here they were about some clandestine business. And all the more surreal because the Worm was all around. Its foot soldiers thronged the city, many of them heading inwards to join that great and spreading spiral. But whatever power lay in the Hermit’s scars, it shielded them from that collective vision entirely.
In her head, where for a long time had been only the echo of her own thoughts, she heard a faint, deep susurration, the muted, distant sound of some great voice, and she shivered. Other than that imagined noise, the city had only a single sound: a thin, constant keening, high and painful to hear, so that she wondered if the Worm, the destroyer, was itself in constant pain.
‘These scars—’ she started, but the Hermit waved her back, and the two of them hid, crouching beside a wall, whilst another of the Scarred Ones – the priests – passed in the distance.
‘They are necessary. Without them, my kinden are just loops and segments of the Worm. Our stigmata, they spiral and they spiral, and they lead the Worm’s attention away so that the mind may be kept free. The scars bind us to the Worm, but keep us from its domination – just enough to be useful, yes. And you hear the Worm’s voice, don’t you? I know you do.’
She could see ahead a broad open space – a market square in any other city perhaps, but amongst the Worm there was nothing bought or sold, only taken. There were pits there, the same circular shafts she had marked from afar – too broad simply to be wells – and she realized with a start that the wailing sound originated there, and with that she knew what it was. The Hermit turned sharply away from the pits, dragging her with him when she paused to stare.
‘You must stay with me!’ he hissed. ‘Step from my shadow and every eye here shall mark you.’
‘I wanted to—’
‘That is not the way.’ There was something agitated, almost furtive in his manner as he pulled her away from the pits. ‘We do not, we do not . . . here, we will enter the earth. Come. Everything will be explained.’
He had found a smaller shaft, and Che watched a string of soldiers exit from it, coursing from the narrow shaft without hesitation. The reverberation in her head seemed louder, as they closed with that aperture, and the image of it as a mouth in the stone was unshakeable.