By the time he reached for the hilt of his sword, they were already upon him and it was too late.
In the lowest reaches of Tharn there were cries and screams, the lightless chambers overrun by enemies who came from deeper still, creeping up through cracks in the rock to kill and steal, all moved by the same great and inhuman hand. Above, the great magicians of the Moth-kinden, the Skryres, stared at their pages of lore and found that none of it meant anything to them any longer. They were left with an understanding of nothing but despair.
Across the sea, Golden Skaetha, glorious heart of the Spider-lands, heart of the web, was riven by earthquakes, thousands crushed and whole dynasties thrown into chaos.
In the cavernous halls of the Delve, where the Mole Crickets laboured in Imperial servitude, the scuttling of claws could be heard in the dark. Whole families of Fly-kinden vanished overnight from the deepest warrens of Shalk and Merro. In the salt mines of Coretsy the miners abandoned their galleries and chambers for the surface, knowing only that the worst had come to pass. In a thousand buried places, what had once been dead ends, closed chambers, blank stone, all were suddenly gaping on to a deeper world that had been hidden and closed off for a thousand years.
Everywhere across the Lowlands and the Empire the ground trembled – what was solid become abruptly brittle. Apt and Inapt alike had dreams of a suffocating ignorance, of a horrifying presence, of their children turning terrible and alien faces to them.
And in that dark world that had been sealed away for so long, Cheerwell Maker stumbled as she arrived at another slave town, staring up towards the living constellation of the ceiling only because she had no other point of reference for the world she had been banished from.
‘It’s gone,’ she got out, and her companions stared at her. Orothellin and the Hermit would have known her meaning, but her friends had parted ways, the better to spread their ragged revolution. She now had only Tynisa and Messel with her, and neither understood what she meant.
‘The Seal has finally given way,’ she told them, trembling. ‘This place is rejoining the world once more.’ The Worm would be casting itself out into the wider world in ever-increasing numbers, and with just one aim in mind.
And as the Worm’s half-world moved back into full conjunction with the real, as if she had been deaf all this while, her strangled and tenuous connection with the outside flared and grew in her mind: her link to her sister in Inaptitude, to Seda.
She braced herself for the venom, the loathing that she was used to, but instead that faint contact came with an altogether different sense from the Wasp Empress.
Reassurance.
Seda was telling her that it would be all right. She had a plan.
Part Three
On the Edge of the Abyss
Twenty-Six
‘What are they?’ Tynan demanded. He was looking red-eyed after being torn from his bed at midnight and put through a battle that nobody really understood. His officers around him looked worse, though, and the oldest of them was ten years his junior. Oski himself felt about a hundred.
‘General,’ he said, ‘we have no idea, but we basically can’t contain them. That armour’s so strong some of the men thought they were automotives or something. The bastards go where they want, when they want. We’ve lost most of our pissing artillery at the harbour, sir – just gone – and they’re using it on us, you can believe me. They’re not slow with the Aptitude.’
‘They’re Spiderlands troops, sir?’ one of the army majors asked.
‘If the Spiderlands had that, why didn’t they use it when we were still . . .’ another snapped back, and then faltered into silence under Tynan’s glower.
‘Sentinels have proven effective as mobile artillery, and are just about the only things that will keep the creatures back, but we only have about seven left. We’ve lost three overnight,’ Oski went on. ‘We have the air, still. We can drop Airborne wherever we want, if only they could accomplish much when they got there. The other troops – the buggers that look like Spiders or Grasshoppers or whatnot – they’re not shot-proof. But now the Tseni have landed several hundred repeating crossbows and snapbows at the docks and, wherever we go, we’re getting bolts coming at us.’
‘Sir.’ A lieutenant had finished marking up a map of Collegium with the latest scouts’ reports and now stepped back for Tynan to look over his work.
‘They’ve slowed up a lot,’ the general noted.
‘Yes, sir,’ the lieutenant agreed. ‘Scouts say they seem to be working to a plan, taking key points – the College, market squares, workshops – and then holding them. We’ve now lost –’ he actually took a breath as though the news was just catching up to him – ‘almost half the city, it looks like, sir.’
‘We just can’t keep them back or bottle them up or anything,’ Oski commented wonderingly. ‘They’re real Sentinels, sir, the old heavy infantry – only like I never saw. If we’d had lads like that, we’d not have disbanded them.’
‘“Stone armour,”’ Tynan threw at him.
‘Sir, you didn’t see.’
‘What’s the latest word on the Ants – not the Tseni, the Ants outside the walls?’
A captain who had been waiting patiently for just this moment stepped forwards. ‘Sir, they’re moving in, but they’re not storming the walls just yet. Sarnesh and Vekken both, they’ve approached to just outside the range of the wall engines.’
‘What are they waiting for?’ Tynan murmured.
‘Morning.’ It was the first thing Vrakir had said since he arrived, standing at the back like a pariah, and yet the only man who didn’t look drawn and pale with fatigue.
Tynan glared at him. ‘If they’d wanted the walls they could have had them by now. We’ve not had the men to keep them back. Someone’s playing games. Besides, at least when morning comes, we can see properly what we’re doing.’ It had become plain that darkness was no encumbrance to any of these invaders. ‘And the locals are just sitting tight, too. No taking to the streets, no throwing themselves at our stings and snapbows. Precious little welcoming of their liberators, as far as that goes, which suggests that they don’t know what the pits the creatures are, either.’
‘They couldn’t be . . . them, could they, sir?’ Oski asked hesitantly. Tynan stared blankly at him, and he added, ‘You know, from the earth. Those villages . . . and when that whole street went . . .’
Tynan grimaced. ‘They’ve changed tactics, if so. We can’t know for sure, but my gut says no.’
‘Sir,’ the lieutenant in charge of scouts put in. ‘Reports say the Tseni are doing a lot of house-to-house, speaking to the locals.’
‘Familiar faces,’ Tynan finished for him. ‘Makes sense. I don’t know: maybe there is some far corner of the Spiderlands where they grow these kinden. How would we know?’ He did not sound convinced. ‘For now, we need better barricades. Redeploy the Sentinels here, and here –’ pointing out spots on the map – ‘Major Oski, artillery to support, here, here . . . We need to draw a line, to secure at least part of the city. You say we can’t stop them? Find a way. Caltrops, explosives, bring houses down on them, whatever it takes.’