He asked them about Che, without much hope – did they know a Beetle girl from the surface who had become lost down here? Would they know if she was a prisoner of the Worm? For a long time, none of them realized who he was talking about.
Then, with the Moths floating back in to warn that the Worm was almost upon them, and the evacuation still ongoing, the people of that nameless place fleeing into the dark, one of the blind men approached Totho warily.
His name was Messel, he said. And, yes, he did know Cheerwell Maker.
Esmail walked amongst the Worm.
He hadn’t been sure that it would work and, even now, he couldn’t know how long he could pass amongst them in safety. He was limiting his exposure.
The sheer geography of this realm had begun to make his mind hurt. Che had spoken of the Worm’s city, and he had thought, It must be just one of many, surely. But no, there was just the one, from whence all the Worm sprang, and all roads led towards it. It was the centre of this prison world, and the Worm itself – the physical form the Centipede-kinden had given to it in their desperation – was the centre of that, ergo the centre of this entire world.
He could not imagine how it worked, how everything would have to curve and funnel in to make that true. Perhaps Che could, or some Moth Skryre with a far greater understanding of the world than poor Esmail.
The breaking of the Seal had sent slow shockwaves through the Worm’s domain, Esmail surmised. This had been a part of the larger world once, and it was trying to be so again. These caves and caverns, this lightless place of many kinden, had simply been another power in the old Inapt games of state, until the Worm’s practices – their aggression, their conversions, their taking of children and repurposing them for their own cause – had caused that great and almighty war of antiquity. Now the underearth was striving to return to its proper place, and Esmail could see cracks and damage, fallen buildings, entire shattered districts of the great stone city. But of course the Worm needed no buildings, no cities. The Worm had been born out of the Centipede ideal and from the depraved desperation of its people with one need only: that there should be the Worm, forever and forever. The Worm was the centre of its own world. The only things it permitted to exist were those that furthered the existence of the Worm. It needed slaves because they produced new life to become segments to graft on to its extended body; because they toiled and mined to arm and equip its mindless host of soldiers. For a long time that uneasy stasis had been maintained by the Scarred Ones, who had the human intellect the Worm lacked. They had preyed and preserved all at once, keeping a precarious balance of feast and famine.
The breach of the Seal had ended that. Now the Worm, which had been coiled in readiness for a thousand years, was striking upwards at that great mass of the sunlit world, not because it was some manner of birthright from before the war, but because it was different to the Worm. Because it was a world that the Worm was not the centre of.
That was the thought that obsessed Esmail, for what he had gleaned from the scarred woman’s mind had suggested that Che had underestimated how the Worm would conquer. Not merely casting the bristling loops of its body up into the wider world, but by warping that world’s very nature, simply by its presence. As its armies funnelled into the lands above, so the Worm would twist the very weave of the world around it, dragging at the centre until all the world, and not just this barren prison, led to its jaws. And by then the Worm would need no others, not soldiers, not priests, not slaves. There would be just the Worm.
Esmail had killed, in his time. He had served evil causes. He was well acquainted with the sort of motives that drove the Wasps to send out their armies or drove Moths to intrigue against one another. He understood evil. The horror of the Worm was that it was not evil. Evil implied a choice. The Worm was what it had been made to be, as innocently destructive as a machine.
The Scarred Ones, though . . . they were evil. He was happily killing any that he could creep up behind and cut open. They had been given the choice, and they had made it.
Here in their city he possessed no magic, but he remembered with a professional clarity just how a Scarred One’s mind had thought, and he remembered the Hermit’s reluctant blessing, and he had cut himself again into the exacting patterns of their mystery. He had taken every word of Che’s account and analysed it as a spy should, and now he walked amongst the bodies of the Worm and they did not notice him. Or, if he felt a ripple of unease run through them, he would add another scar to his flesh and quell their suspicions. He avoided the Scarred Ones themselves, who would know in an instant he was not one of them. It was hardly textbook fieldcraft, but it had kept him alive and undetected so far.
And he had seen it all. He had not realized that he came here only because Che’s story had seemed too bizarre to be believed, but now his eyes had been opened: it was true in every word.
Or every word but one. He had yet to see that final inner secret. He had yet to confront the Worm inside its den.
The child pits had nearly finished him. He had been a hard man once, but having children, loving children, had fractured some part of his inner armour. He had stared down at the terrified, lonely infants, seen them look up at him beseechingly as though he could do anything for them. He had come so close to trying to help, even though all he would have accomplished would have been to destroy his own cover.
He had looked in each subsequent pit, witnessing each group of children one step further removed from their roots, from their individuality. He had seen, stage by stage, the Worm consume everything that they had been, and leave nothing but its hollow casts behind.
It was after that that he had started murdering the Scarred Ones whenever they gave him the opportunity. He desperately wanted to kill somebody for it, and they were the only ones to whom it was even possible to attach blame. If it had been feasible to go backwards somehow and kill all their ancestors as well, all the great magicians of the Centipede-kinden when they had first thought up this madness, then he would have done that, too.
Not long ago he had made a surprise discovery: he had found out where the Scarred Ones lived. There was a nest of caves beneath the city, unconnected to the tunnels leading to their god. There the true remnants of the Centipede-kinden clung to their precarious existence, hiding and breeding like vermin, like parasites in their own places. He saw them there, and their children – already scarred to keep them from the wrath of the mindless host all around them. He could have stalked in and butchered them, but found that it was not in him, quite, to do so. Besides, they did not all sleep at once, but operated some kind of staggered rota, so that some were always vigilant. At first he imagined that they feared some intruder such as himself. Then he realized that they feared the end of their immunity, that their god would suddenly realize that it had no need for them. Such feeble sentries could not have kept that tide out, but still they watched. It was not quite enough to engender sympathy in him, but it came close.
He had no idea how Che’s own work was going – her attempts to gather and organize the slaves. He had been out of contact now for unknown days and uncounted moonless nights. All he knew was that there were prisoners being brought into the city on a regular basis, but no clue as to whether they were captured in battle or were just part of the Worm’s attempts to consume its human chattels here to fuel its assault on the world above.