A moment later he visibly twitched, reading it again. ‘The Second . . .’
‘Yes, sir,’ Bergild said, with exaggerated patience.
The Second have fallen back from Collegium. The Sarnesh are marching. The war . . .
The war is coming this way.
‘You have an answer for me, Colonel?’
His eyes flicked towards her, then back to the message. Tynan was asking for any and all military aid he could provide. ‘What does Tynan think I have here? There’s barely a garrison, and when the Beetles here get word . . .’ Actually, the Beetles here would do nothing, he reflected. They would sit there in their double-sided coats, ready to turn them at a moment’s notice. A Helleren uprising was not the problem. The Alliance cities, however . . .
‘Go and tell Tynan he’s on his own.’ Nessen stood up abruptly, already planning exit strategies.
Within sight of Porta Mavralis, they had watched the Worm attack. A caravan had been travelling north up the Silk Road – Totho and Maure had almost tried to join it, checked only by a residual caution. They had not realized that their lives rested on so simple a decision.
The caravan had consisted of a dozen beetle-drawn wagons, two score travellers and two dozen armed guards – which seemed a lot. Then again, the Empire was fighting Spiderlands troops not so very far away, and a long-range airborne squad might have slipped over the lines to come down and cause trouble.
Totho and Maure had shadowed them all night, travelling unseen in their wake. Whoever the travellers were, whatever their goods, they were not stopping to set up camp.
They had been going through a pass between hills when it happened: the earth rippling and cracking, wagons sinking up to their axles, turning over, the beetles rearing and twisting in their traces. The travellers and their guards were running back and forth, unsure of what was going on. Totho and Maure had heard their shouts of panic.
The Worm issued forth, some from the earth itself, more from a great rift in the hills. The two of them had watched those swift expressionless warriors dissect the caravan with clinical efficiency, as ants might cut up and parcel out some large beast that had fallen into their jaws. The guards were slain, the travellers likewise; even the draught beetles were just cut apart, without hesitation or sentiment. The wagons themselves were prised open, the human bodies of the Worm showing no sign that they understood the purpose of such things or how they worked. Everything within, along with bodies and the pieces of bodies, was carried back inside the hill, the Centipede-kinden working with horrifying speed and leaving only spilled blood and broken wood in their wake. The entire business, from attack to the site being left picked clean, was a matter of minutes.
Neither Totho nor Maure had made any attempt to help the travellers, but whilst she had fallen back and back, unwilling even to look at the attackers, Totho had stared on, his hands on his snapbow, fingers twitching. Maure had wanted to go to him and drag him back, for fear that the Worm would see him and find her, too, when they came for him, but there was so much anger in Totho that she did not dare.
After the butchery was done, he turned to her, angrily gesturing her back to his side.
‘That was them, was it?’ he demanded.
Maure nodded cautiously, still not coming close.
‘Savages,’ was his verdict.
‘Oh, surely,’ she agreed. ‘And in ways you can’t imagine.’ She paused, studying his face. ‘Vile, unnatural, utterly without . . . whatever it is that makes us us.’
Totho shrugged, his armour plates scraping. ‘None of that Inapt business now. Savages, like I said. Not a crossbow amongst them.’
‘And yet you yourself didn’t stand up and show them the superiority of your Aptitude. I wonder why?’
He sent her a sharp glance, but then looked down at his snapbow, plainly troubled by the thought.
‘You think they’re Inapt,’ she noted. ‘They’re not. They don’t believe in my magic, any more than you do. Less than you do, perhaps. They don’t even tell each other stories of when the magic was. But they’re not Apt, either. They don’t believe in your gears and machines. And when they get close, they can stop you believing, too. A world without artifice or magic, that’s the Worm’s world. A world without anything of the human mind.’
‘Artifice doesn’t work like that. I can shoot you dead with this snapbow whether you believe or not.’
‘Only if you can think how to make it work.’
‘It’s just pulling a trigger.’
‘And yet I couldn’t do it. Or perhaps I could do whatever that is just by fumbling at the thing, but I’d not be able to aim it like a bow, and probably I’d just shoot a rock with it, or a friend, or even myself. But you can’t imagine what it’s like to not know all those things you take for granted. And if I have a better idea of how you Apt think, it’s only because the Woodlouse-kinden who trained me counted both types in their number.’
She wanted to move on, but he would have none of it. The contained massacre they had witnessed had not affected him in the way that it had her. Or perhaps it had, but he buried his feelings deep. He was obviously not an expressive man – his emotions were bottled up and put under pressure, and when they burst to the surface, they had soured into varying degrees of anger. She knew that the true object of all his animosity was Totho himself, but that would not stop him harming her if she got too close at the wrong time.
‘Those things . . . those ignorant . . . whatever they were. She is amongst them, even now?’
Maure only nodded.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’
‘I hope not.’
‘Do you?’ He hauled his helm off and stared at it. ‘If I could know that she was dead, I think I’d be free. I could walk away. There’d be nothing I could do. She’d have passed the limits of even what artifice is capable of. But I can’t know.’ He was a man in dark armour, picked out against the darkness of the sky only because she had Moth eyes. ‘She won’t leave me alone.’
I know, she thought. I see her there, the ghost of her that’s in your mind. But what can I say? You can’t understand me, and you wouldn’t let go even if you could.
‘There is no kinden that artifice and Aptitude can’t conquer.’ He said it to the blank face of his helm, and to the hills and the sky, and to the rift that the Worm had ventured from. ‘Progress: how can we have progress if there was some thing such as that, which could undo all our work since the revolution.’
‘Totho,’ Maure tried, ‘I know—’
‘What do you care? Your magic is nothing – a lie, not even a spent force.’ There was no rancour in his tone. ‘But I have power. Drephos taught me that. In my own hands, I have more power than any magician that was ever born.’
She saw him differently then, for just a moment, in as vertiginous a shift of perspective as she had ever experienced. For a moment she saw him as he would have been, had he been Inapt; had he been born a thousand years before. She saw the questing hero of Commonweal legend, with lance and bright mail, willing to brave the stuff of nightmares for the woman he loved, invincible in his purity of heart, his nobility of spirit. And herself, of course: the magician who advised him and sent him off on his journey. There were so many stories that followed that old road.