He had identified the one column that would be quickest on the trail of the fugitives and dispatched the defenders to intercept it. The miners of Old Aderax were strong and determined, and many of them were huge Mole Crickets, but he knew they would die, and he knew that they themselves had not quite appreciated this. It was a cold decision, but he made it quickly, without hesitation. Regret he would save for later.
He himself had gone hunting.
His small magics had almost vanished after they had been banished here, but he was still sensitive to the fluctuations of his meagre personal power. When the Seal had broken, as Che claimed, he had sensed a little heightening of his strength, perhaps as magic began seeping in from the wider world beyond. Whenever he was close to the foot soldiers of the Worm, however, it was gone entirely. The power they had tapped into was a primal, mindless, pre-human archetype that knew and understood neither Aptitude nor magic, and so denied them both, potent enough in its ignorance to enforce the same on all who came into contact with it.
Nevertheless he wanted answers, and most of his training needed no magic, and he had crept and lurked through the near-abandoned galleries of Old Aderax, listening to the fates of those few who had been too slow or too stubborn to leave.
It had been a nerve-racking business, because Esmail could not see in the dark as well as his quarry could, but he was clever and careful, and eventually his moment had come. Secure in the knowledge that the Worm’s human bodies had scoured Old Aderax of life, one of the Scarred Ones had gone wandering.
Esmail had struck, descending on the robed figure, dealing a blow that sent the priest insensible to the floor, then pausing, waiting. He had been sure that, had he tried this with one of the husks that formed the army of the Worm, he would even now be running for his life as their entire force came for him, each individual body just a segment of the angry whole. How separate were the Scarred Ones? That had been the test.
A slow count of five as he had crouched against the stone, and no instant backlash. He had shouldered the unconscious body and stolen away with it, avoiding the many-limbed coils of the Worm as it thrashed and clawed at Old Aderax, executing the few it could find there and carrying their bodies away.
There would come a time to feel horror, Esmail knew. Even he, whose heritage should have steeped him in blood, could not go into a place like this creature’s mind and remain unmoved. Esmail had listened to every word Che said, and he knew that the Scarred Ones were about something unspeakable, beyond mere tyranny or cruelty. He clung to his humanity, embraced it. Once he had done what needed to be done, he might face the memories, but until then he must entertain nothing but professionalism.
Orothellin had led the refugees into the darkness, keeping the majority safe by sacrificing detachments of men and women, sending them to lead the Worm’s questing tendrils away – and to die, surely, Esmail thought – and Esmail had caught the rabble up eventually. When they saw what he had brought them, they had wanted to tear the priest to pieces. When he told them he had a use for the creature, they had begun to suspect a madness in him.
But he was not mad. He was desperate. He was inventive. He was going to see if his discipline, all that vaunted training, could subvert the will of the Worm.
The refugees from Old Aderax had made a wretched and temporary home out of a scar in the rock, but they would be moving on through the pitch-dark landscape soon. Orothellin had been telling them that they must keep ahead of the Worm, though Esmail was not even sure if that was possible. The Slug-kinden had very clearly decided that anything resembling an organized defence was a lost cause. He was hoping to keep people on the move until the Worm had sent the bulk of its forces elsewhere – meaning to the lands under the sun, the Old World, Esmail’s home.
Esmail had thought about that, coldly and clinically as his training required, and decided that, even if he liked the idea, it wouldn’t work. He had listened when Che had spoken of the terrible beast below, the avatar of the Centipede-kinden whose blind hunger possessed and drove the legion of bodies that comprised the Worm. It was an impossible thing, a terrible thing that the Centipedes had called up and turned into, at a time when it was either that or extinction.
And Esmail, the assassin, considered his chances. What would happen to the Worm if he was able to kill god?
Had he been given free rein with his particular brand of magic, he would already be walking freely through the foot soldiers of the Worm, seeking his chances, but his old trick of taking on the face of another would now fall away the moment he got close to a single human segment of the beast, let alone to the colossal creature itself.
But not, apparently, the priests themselves. There was humanity enough left in them that they could still become his victims.
This one was a woman, he noted, although he had not realized before. She was pale and lumpen and her skin positively boiled with spiralling scars. Taking that pasty face of hers would not serve, but Che and the Hermit had showed that there was another way.
First, though, he needed to understand.
His remaining little handful of magic, which he had sheltered like a candle down here, would finally see use. The Scarred One snarled at him and spat, and called down curses on his head as he reached for her mind.
She sensed him, and her defences were remarkable, walls after walls, all slamming into place about her, fending him off, turning him away. She was as defended as a magician, and for a moment he was thrown, unable to force his way into her, his strength venting itself against the barriers of her brain.
How has she learned to do this? Why should she need it?
And, with that, he understood. She did not need to fend off roving assassins who might want to pillage her brain, but every day of her life she must shield her mind from the thing that was her god. Mind was the very quality that it abhorred, that it denied in its tools and subjects. The higher things of mind were blotted out even in the presence of its servants. If it detected the decaying human thought left in its unasked-for priesthood, then it would obliterate them entirely.
Knowing that, Esmail attacked again, drawing upon not strength but sheer finesse, not the hammer but the needle, to pierce through all the little gaps in her armour that the bludgeon of her god could not have penetrated.
He was in . . . and in that moment her whole mind, her history and her nature, were spread before him like an abattoir.
Afterwards, the horror came, and he abandoned the corpse that he had made of her and found some place out of the sight of humanity and shook and shuddered for all the dead in Old Aderax, and for all that he had since learned.
He had seen how they lived, the Scarred Ones: the last true Centipede-kinden. Priests and leaders, as they styled themselves, servants of their insatiable god. But he had seen through their eyes. He had seen how they scratched a living inside the city of the Worm, maintaining their fragile identities against the constant eroding tide of the godhead. He had seen how they were permitted to direct the armies of labour, to organize and provision and supply. He had seen how they were suffered, an irritant that salved the sore it had caused, and so lived on another day. They had become parasites in the corpse of their own history, and they knew that one day the Worm would not need them. The perfect unthinking monstrosity that they had called up in their time of need would consume them, just as it would consume everything else.
They comprehended all of that, did these scarred priests, and yet they did nothing. They cringed and served, and they sacrificed countless lives to an entity that only grew and consumed and made everything like itself, just as the Centipedes had always done, every child of every kinden becoming just a new segment in their composite body. Only now even they would be the victims of their own work, and the only victory they could hope for was that they would be the very last, when all else was gone.