The Auxillians were still there. The Ants and Bees and even the Grasshoppers were falling back with a discipline and dignity that any drill sergeant would have been proud of, utterly unmolested by the enemy. The Mantids were just rushing straight past them, across the front of their retreating formations, as though they weren’t there.
On the other side, the Ants from Maile were pulling out with the same almost dream-like calm, as though they had not noticed that there was a bloody battle in progress. The Lowlander right was already moving in to catch Brakker’s other flank.
Brakker opened his mouth to give some order – he had no idea what, but it was plain that something remarkable would be required, the sort of order that went down in the history books.
He never made the histories. A Sarnesh bolt took him in the chest as he hung above his army, and he dropped back into the panicking mass of his men. In moments those Wasps that still could were trusting to their wings, whilst the Auxillians marched implacably away.
Thirty-Two
He had a lamp. The lamp was life.
It gave out a harsh, greenish-white chemical glare, and it would last for a long time but not forever. That indicated Totho’s deadline, his allotted time to find Che and get her out of this black and unnatural place.
He was not sure what he had expected, but this was not it. He had thought of caves, winding tunnels where the monstrous Worm-men walked. He had thought that he could catch and question one of them, perhaps. He had thought that all roads would lead him to Che.
In this, he recognized, he was guilty of thinking as the Inapt must think, that there was some pattern directing life, so that these things worked out.
The caves were a world in themselves, vast and overarching. The stone sky was filled with stars in some way he could not understand. Moths battled through the air, and also terrible things, great albino shadows he glimpsed at the very edge of his light. Here was not a warren of narrow passageways that he might search methodically until one of them was found to contain Che. He had thought to find her in some prison, at the mercy of a villain that Totho could slay. He had come to rescue her, after all. Poor, helpless Che was always getting herself captured. It was almost endearing, save that those enemies who caught her seemed thereafter to become the target for her mercurial affections: Moths, Wasps, vile and deceitful kinden all.
But the caves remained a world that was vast and unplumbed, and he knew she must be here somewhere but he had no way of finding her.
He had seen some of the Worm-men. When they had come within the reach of his lamp he had been petrified at first by the fear that the thing he clung to must make him a beacon to the whole of this dark world. Later he had come to realize that their eyes worked backwards: they saw in the darkness, but they could not see his light. It meant nothing to them.
He had killed them initially. He had intended to confront them, or to capture some straggler, but he had forgotten the skin-crawling way they moved all together, the utter inhuman detachment that was in their every look and motion. Revulsion had risen within him instantly on seeing them – the simple fact of having them within sight was more than he could deal with. He had ambushed them with his snapbow and emptied a precious magazine into them, striking down half a dozen instantly at long range and before they knew he was there.
Then they had seen him, and something terrible had happened. He had stood there with his snapbow – he was up on a jutting rise and had been shooting down at them – and his hands had lost their way. The very logic of what he was doing, that deep, ingrained understanding of mechanism, of cause and effect, had gone. His finger had been on the trigger, and had even twitched on it, spitting a single bolt uselessly off into the dark. It was not that the weapon had jammed. It was that he himself had.
They had come for him – were already coming for him – and he might have stood there until he died if they had not been so repulsive and unnatural. That instinct to get away owed nothing to those higher parts of his mind that had come unmoored. Clutching his useless snapbow and his lamp, he had fled them and escaped.
Later, hiding in a cave after driving out the pallid long-legged spider that was its previous occupant, he had tried to understand what had happened. He had panicked, he told himself. The sight of the Worm-men had unnerved him. It had been a human failing, and therefore one that he, Totho the Apt, could overcome.
He had seen things in his life that he had fought to explain away and he had succeeded in each case. Time and the dulling of memory had allowed him to conquer even the sight of the river Jamail in Khanaphes, stirred to sudden flood and scouring one bank of the invading Scorpion-kinden whilst leaving the locals on the other bank untouched. In his Apt heart, he could look back on that sight and know that there had been a rational explanation because he himself lived in a rational world.
When he remembered confronting the Worm, though, he found his powers of self-deception were insufficient to the task. He could deal with attempts to add new and intolerable experiences into his life, but this was an absence, a theft. When the attention of the Worm had turned on him, he had been stripped of all those things that made him him.
He ate sparingly of the food he had brought – another constantly encroaching limit to the time that he had. He was suddenly convinced that he would not be able to find his way out of this place if he did not find Che. His journey only went one way. No retreat.
He slept, dreading what dreams would follow. When he awoke again, adrift in time in a strange, cold place, he turned out the lamp and forced himself to face the darkness.
There was other light, aside from his chemical lantern and those distant, mobile stars. Something out there was ablaze. To Totho, fire meant the work of human hands, and he had nowhere else to head for.
He could see people, when he drew closer. Because of the lamp, some of them had already spotted him. In this dark-mirror world, that meant that they were not the enemy. Or not necessarily the enemy. Not the enemy that he feared.
But they were a horrible ragbag of creatures, nonetheless. He had the snapbow ready, and he nearly killed the first of them that he saw. They were Moths. Of all creatures other than the Worm, Moths were those he most did not want to see.
There were others too, he saw shortly afterwards, and the Moths were their advance scouts, their fliers. As he strode into their community in his dark mail, with his lamp in one hand and his snapbow over his shoulder, they stared at him as though he had come from another world or another time. Which he had.
There were Beetles there, and Mole Crickets, and a weird dark-grey velvet-haired people whose Art let them throw nets of gluey strands at their prey or their enemies, and pallid men and women with no eyes at all, who saw through their feet and their long fingers. Confronting them, seeing them study him with just the same wariness of the familiar facing the alien, he felt that he had taken the final step out of a sane world and into some ancient folk story.
They were in the process of leaving, he understood. They were the slaves of the Worm, and the Worm was consuming its slaves, burning them like fuel so that it could make its grand assault on the world that Totho knew. He gained this understanding in fragments and pieces. They were all scared of him, so none of them was particularly coherent. He learned first of all, though, that the Worm was coming: their common enemy.