‘Don’t!’ Thalric interrupted. ‘Nobody cares. You’d only put us off. Let’s face it, there’s nothing wholesome out there to ferment. I don’t want to hear that it’s crushed mushrooms and cricket piss or something.’ He snagged the jar from Tynisa and tipped it back almost contemptuously. A moment later he almost spilled the lot, Che rescuing it from him just in time as he doubled over, coughing ferociously.
‘So much for the Empire,’ Tynisa remarked, sounding somewhat croaky herself.
Che sniffed at the jar’s lip and recoiled. ‘I think I’ll abstain.’
‘Oh, get some in you,’ Thalric managed – or something like it.
‘Well, yes, I can see the power of good it’s done you.’
Tynisa met her eyes, the two of them grinning at each other just as though they’d never left Collegium.
‘Go on, drink. Perhaps it’s magic,’ Thalric pressed.
Are we drunk, already? Tynisa wondered, but it was not the vile concoction of the Hermit’s that had brought on this mood. Rather it was the knowledge of what they were about, the terrible odds, the horrors of the Worm that Che had brought back from that cursed city. What was there to lose, therefore? The worst was already here, and had been squatting and growing in these caverns for a thousand years.
Like the wine, thought Tynisa, and she snorted. In their minds they were making the Worm small enough to manage. They were belittling it, each of them inside their heads, because otherwise it was so large and appalling that they would have given up.
Che tried some of the Hermit’s vintage and gagged, pulling a face that Tynisa remembered from years before. ‘That’s what you do with real wine,’ the Weaponsmaster taunted, remembering when Stenwold had first let his niece try the stuff.
‘Oh, yes,’ Che was blinking furiously, ‘it’s quite lovely. Esmail?’
For a moment the Assassin was going to remain aloof and preserve his dignity, but then he took the jar and took a long swallow, keeping his face meticulously composed, though Tynisa saw one of his hands crook itself into a claw.
‘A little tame,’ he decided, each word precisely pronounced, and handed the jar back to the Hermit, who had watched stony-faced through the entire routine, blankly baffled by all of it.
A few days later they walked into Cold Well, and the reaction of the locals was gratifying. Thalric looked at their faces and saw every emotion there that he would have looked for in a slave: guilt, terror, shame, shock. These wretched downtrodden animals had no doubt consigned the memory of their surface-world visitors to their impoverished histories. No doubt they had been telling each other how the Worm had caught those impossible visitors, those imposters, those renegades. They would have nodded at each other, oh so sagely – how right they had been not to fight the Worm.
And here we are, you worthless maggots. How he felt about Che’s current venture was hard to say. Thalric looked on these creatures with disdain. Not only were they slaves, they had been enslaved in such a humiliating way as even the Empire had never contrived. Born and dying in the dark, barely more than a herd of sheep with useful skills, kept about in order to breed the next generation of their oppressors.
Che had told it all, spared nothing.
And Thalric had thought, The vermin are beyond saving, and yet at the same time something had risen up in him, contradicting and complementing that part of his Wasp upbringing that still saw slaves as something inferior. What the Worm was, what it did here in its lightless places, was an abomination – something more unnatural, by whole orders of magnitude, than anything he had seen in Khanaphes or the Commonweal. Even the horrors of Argastos paled before the Worm the man had been set to guard.
The panic, the scattering of the slaves, was predictable. They had no resources, no resolution, no purpose other than to run about and babble.
So come listen to us. We have your resources and your resolution and your purpose, right here.
There were seven of them that went striding into Cold Well like figures out of some Inapt legend. Che went first, her arm bandaged about the spiral scars she bore there. Tynisa limped at her side, gaunt and silent, balanced by Esmail’s slender shadow. Bringing up the rear came the ponderous figure of Orothellin, and at his side the Hermit, picking nervously at his filthy robes. He had never come down here before, nor to any of the other slaves’ places. Nobody knew how they would react to him.
Messel was keeping close to the big Slug-kinden as well, to shield himself from the ire of his kin here, but Thalric ranged out wider, taking advantage of his wings now that the fires of Cold Well were lighting his way. If any of the slaves did have more steel than the Wasp gave them credit for and chose to turn it on Che rather than the Worm, then his sting would be ready for them. It would serve as a solid object lesson.
There was a welcoming committee rather reluctantly assembling ahead, a few levels down. Thalric overflew them, realizing that not one of them even looked up. He caught a few familiar faces: the Moth woman – Atraea? – was there in the centre, and that big Mole Cricket smith – something Forge-Iron – and a handful of others: Woodlice, Beetles, another blind Cave Cricket like Messel. Forge-Iron had a weighty hammer in his hand, his clothes sooty from his work. There were a few staves otherwise, and probably some knives.
And yet Esmail saw scores of those nasty little Worm swords all waiting for delivery, the stupid bastards.
‘What do you want?’ Atraea demanded, her voice shaking. ‘You must not come here!’ With her blank white eyes it was impossible to know whom she was most frightened of.
Thalric swooped down and found a perch overlooking the meeting, landing delicately enough that still nobody noticed him. He saw Che stop and regard the delegation grimly.
‘To get you to fight,’ the Beetle girl began.
There was a murmur that passed back through the crowd, one of horror, of incredulity, as though they had never heard the word ‘fight’ before. Some were already shepherding their children away as if they did not want them to learn such inappropriate language.
Keeping them safe for the Worm, Thalric reflected derisively.
Atraea stepped forward, leaning on her staff. She had one hand about her stomach, and Thalric suddenly realized that she was pregnant – would have thought she was too old, myself – and after that he saw how many of the women were, or might be. The thought struck him as depressing beyond all the tales that Che had told. Not so long ago they had been handing over their babies to the Worm, and even then they had been working on the next batch. This was not a community of slaves. It was a factory.
‘You cannot be here,’ the Moth woman hissed desperately, as though trying to wish Che out of existence. ‘You will bring the Worm down on us with your madness. They will punish us.’
‘They’re already on their way,’ Che told her, and Thalric fancied he saw in her face at last a little of his own scorn, at these pathetic specimens. The reaction was certainly the one he expected from such craven wretches, the underland slaves wailing and moaning and lamenting and yet doing precisely nothing, not even offering a threat of retaliation against the bearers of bad tidings.
Except, no – here came the big man, Forge-Iron, pushing past his fellows, jaw jutting angrily. ‘You have drawn them here,’ he accused.
‘No, but we are here because we saw them on their way. They are coming to exact another tax.’