‘Orothellin says . . .’ the Hermit told her again, ‘but, no, you will sense it yourself. I feel it myself. We go to the cavern that all roads lead to. History is thick here. The way we were, my people, when first we were sealed down here, you will feel it. I have come here and known just how it was, for them.’
He ducked inside, and she could only follow him, hauled unwilling in his footsteps for fear of the Worm recognizing her as a trespasser.
‘You cannot imagine it, you who have always had your sun. What desolation they must have known, seeing themselves so humbled, so trapped. How they sought within themselves for some means to survive.’ He was picking up pace now, forcing her almost to run after him. Half the time he was on all fours, scrabbling and scuttling. She wondered what would happen if they met a Scarred One, here where there could be no hiding.
‘Do you feel it?’ he demanded, far too loudly. ‘Do you feel my ancestors searching for their purpose? Do you feel their terrible despair?’
And she did. It was like a sour taste in her mouth, the anguish of an entire civilization locked away to rot. Looking back, the Hermit must have seen it mirrored in her face.
‘Those feelings are still here, all the images and the emotions that my kinden divested themselves of. When they found the Worm within them.’
‘But they were always the Worm – or the Moths called them that . . .’ Che objected.
‘Oh, the Moths and their clever insults. How could they have known that down here we would find the Worm in truth?’ the Hermit hissed.
Then he would answer no more questions, but led her down, ever downwards, through cramped tunnels, steep slopes, and always that wordless voice waxing in her mind – a constant urging, an incessant dirge like no sound she had ever heard before.
And then the Hermit had stopped, and she was looking out into a vast cavern from a high vantage point. We must have gone as far down as this world allows. But she had no idea of how the metaphysics and the geology would work, and the sight before her gave the lie to her thought, because the rock below was riven by a chasm that descended further into the depths, into a darkness beyond even her eyes’ ability to pierce.
Approaching that plunging drop she saw a handful of figures and flinched back when she identified no fewer than three of the Scarred Ones, the Hermit’s former brethren. They had some of the Centipede soldiers, too, but the most prominent figure was surely a slave, a hulking Mole Cricket man who looked as though he should be throwing his captors about the cave. Instead, he stood with head bowed, arms by his sides, utterly resigned to . . . what?
Will they throw him into the rift? was her initial thought. The Hermit’s hand clenched on her shoulder painfully as he crouched beside her, and she saw a bizarre war of expressions on his face: disgust, fear and a dreadful hungry anticipation.
There was something coming, and with it came the voice. That colossal echoing murmur was growing and growing inside her head, strengthening into an incoherent ranting, the colossal demands of something infantile and hungry and almost mindless. The soldiers of the Worm and their scarred priests were falling back from the slave, where he stood on the very lip of the chasm.
‘What is it?’ Che got out, feeling that monstrous ascent within every fibre of her being. ‘What’s coming?’
‘God,’ breathed the Hermit in her ear, and then god came.
It uncoiled from the depths. Perhaps it was the depths. Che’s eyes, which knew no darkness, could not see it, only the cold stark night that radiated out from its great articulated body. It reared high towards the roof of the cave, and a wave of crushing despair washed over her. It was a hole in the world in the shape of a centipede, from its flailing whiplike antennae and the hooked poison claws that crowned its head to the rows of clutching, pointed limbs. Screaming horror seethed visibly off it like dark steam, even as that roaring voice reached an incomprehensible crescendo in Che’s mind.
And still it came, segment after sightless segment thrusting that head up to sway over the gathering below.
And Che beheld the Worm.
She forced herself to stare at it, to encompass it within her understanding, to reduce it to something she could name. Just a centipede, she told herself desperately, but how far from the truth! It was a wrong made physical. It was a devouring tear in the substance of the world, a writhing, many-legged door to somewhere that made this cavern world seem verdant and filled with life in comparison.
It was not utterly lightless. Small pale specks seemed to swim in its depths, or across its carapace, and Che sought them out, hoping to find something there she could understand.
She found it, and she wished she had not. The substance of the Worm was swimming with faces. They were faces of many kinden, rising and submerging, contorting into plastic screams that only added to the Worm’s ranting chorus. And Che remembered what Maure had said, that there were not even fragments of the dead here in this underworld. Now she saw. Now she was witness to where the dead went, both whole and in fragments. They went to the Worm, to drown in its freezing depthless body and be devoured.
‘Under the sun, perhaps my people could not have found god,’ the Hermit whispered, ‘but here, buried in their own despair and self-hatred, they reached within themselves, and this was what they called to. You see it? You see god?’
‘I see . . .’ Old College lessons were rising to the upper reaches of her thoughts. ‘What did they do? What did they call?’
And that swaying head, boiling with a darkness so intense it was harder to look at than the sun, had risen twenty feet or more over the gathering below and, with most of its body yet confined to the depths, had gone very still.
‘Our essence, the heart of our kinden, the perfect form of the Centipede, from which we draw our Art and our identity,’ the Hermit breathed. ‘We reached into ourselves with all our rage and spite, and ripped out all that we were, all of the human, and gave form to what was left, our base nature, our totem as seen through the mask of our bitter defeat: our god.’
The doctrine of perfect forms . . . Of course she knew the theory, how each kinden had a perfect exemplar, a theoretical ultimate from whence all Art was drawn. It was only a theory, though. She was not supposed to be able to look at one.
‘What does it want?’ she demanded.
‘Want? It wants nothing but the Worm. It wants what the Worm – my people – always wanted. It wants to be alone in the world, to have a world that is nothing but segments of the Worm, replicated over and over. It has no other desires, no thought, no reason to exist save to continue to be, and to grow greater, and to destroy all that is not of itself. What else could be the result of all of our despair and horror but this insensate, pointless god of ours?’
With that, the god of the Worm struck – savagely swift for something so large – and she saw those puncturing claws seize on the Mole Cricket, who screamed at last, writhed in their grip even as they crushed his body between them. Che listened for some change now to that constant hungry mantra, but there was nothing except that litany of mindless desire, over and over again.
‘Why does it want slaves?’ she wondered numbly.
‘It does not,’ the Hermit told her. ‘You think god cares? But the priests will sacrifice nonetheless. It gives an illusion of control, but it is only an illusion. This is what you propose to fight, Beetle girl. This is the source of my kinden’s dominion – over this world, and soon over the sunlit lands as well. This is the Worm that will eat up the world. Now you see. Now you share our despair.’