That there were prisoners at all was because of the priests, he guessed. The Worm would have no use for living slaves to be brought to its city, any more than it had a use for the city itself. The priests, though, had concocted their insane, all-denying religion around it, and told themselves that their practices earned them its blessings, and their sacrifices protected them from its wrath. Esmail could see, with utter clarity, that there were no blessings and likewise no wrath.
The priests killed their prisoners fairly quickly. Many they killed themselves in lesser rites – and the bodies went to feed the Worm’s own growing mass, or to load the tables of the priests themselves. Far more were being taken down into the chamber that Che had spoken of – the true final point of all roads within this stone nightmare. The Worm was hungry.
He had been steeling himself to follow one such expedition. He needed to view his enemy with his own eyes before he brought this whole edifice down.
In the end, his hand was forced. He would never know if, unassisted, he might have possessed the courage to make that journey deeper into the earth.
He saw the latest band of prisoners brought in. Amongst them was a familiar face.
The big man stood in the centre of this ragged band of slaves, hands extended over them as though still trying to protect them in some way. Orothellin.
Esmail watched that huge, haggard figure even as the Scarred Ones came for him, weaving through the constantly busy throng of soldiers. The big man had mustered a certain dignity for the occasion, and Esmail badly wanted to make himself known in some way: to let Orothellin know that he was not alone in these last moments.
Then, of course, the soldiers were separating the giant out, for who was a better offering to the Worm than this man, this veteran of a thousand years and a symbol of their captivity?
They took him away, Orothellin moving slowly, almost as though he was still half asleep, with the people of the Worm milling around him like children.
The thought suddenly made Esmail sick. Of course, like children. They were all somebody’s children. Generations of children stolen and hollowed out and sent to tyrannize and kill their own kin. And no wonder the ancient world had stood together against the Worm.
This time, he followed when they took Orothellin beneath the earth. This time, the Scarred Ones did not delay. There was a dreadful excitement about them. They know who he is. They have been hunting him for a long time.
And it will buy you nothing from your god, save that the wretched man is perhaps a larger morsel than most.
He crept in their shadow using the skills of a long life in the trade – no magic, but his expertise had always counted more than mere magician’s tricks. There were many of them, and soldiers too – had there been fewer Esmail could have won Orothellin a moment’s freedom, for all that they were in the heart of the enemy’s domain. As it was, natural caution won out and he merely watched. What else, after all, was a spy for? Today he was a spy.
Tomorrow an assassin, he fervently hoped.
They led him, all unknown, to the lair of their god, that same great rift that Che had described, and there the Worm came for Orothellin, and devoured him and his thousand years without thought or appreciation, and went away again.
Immediately afterwards, Esmail left the broken city and found himself some hidden nook in the stone to creep into, and he trembled and stared at his hands in the darkness.
He couldn’t do it. He saw that now. Even if the thing was not a god, then it was still too vast, too dark, too terrifying. He had no Art or skill or useless, useless magic that would permit him the hubris of attacking the Worm. His courage went only so far. It could not be done.
Thirty-Three
Everyone had questions, but Eujen had no answers, not real ones. When are they coming back? was the one he heard most often. So many citizens of Collegium had marched off with the Sarnesh, and people wanted to know when they would see their loved ones, their relatives, their business partners or drinking mates. Worse, there had been that airship which had escaped ahead of the Second Army’s retreat. Nobody had realized at the time just what had been going on – not even the general of the Second, apparently. Only after the dust had cleared did anyone realize that the Imperial Slave Corps had simply floated away with several hundred citizens.
Everyone was mourning someone: dead or missing or marched off with the army. Whole sections of the city were running short-handed. There weren’t enough hands to rebuild or to reorganize. Collegium was merely limping through the days.
When are they coming back? people asked about the Merchant Companies. Eujen himself wanted to know that. What news he received from the troops showed that nobody there knew, either.
And there was that other trouble – the attacks under cover of darkness that scoured isolated farms and mills and villages and left no witnesses – or sometimes left a row of houses untenanted without warning or explanation. Everyone had somehow been assuming that it was some game of the Wasps, some pastime of Tynan’s Second, but the Wasps were gone, and it was getting worse, and so they came to Eujen and asked him what he intended to do about it.
He had not been appointed the leader of the city. There was no real Assembly. That sad rump that the Wasps had permitted to ‘advise’ had since been disbanded, and those who had sat on it were all doing their best to explain that, really, they had been given no choice, and of course they had worked against the Empire in so many, alas invisible, ways. At the same time, nobody was about to say they needed another governor to rule the city with a tyrant’s rod. Their intricate system of government had been taken apart, and nothing brought in to replace it.
Eujen, a student who could walk only through the intervention of artifice, had been the de facto Collegiate Speaker in exile in Sarn. Now he found that people were still looking to him for leadership, when there was so very little he could do.
So he did the little that he could. He found other people who themselves could only do a little. He got them together and talking to each other. He combined all those small contributions, building one on another until he had something that looked as though it would at least keep the wheels turning for now.
He started with his friends and associates, with a keen realization of, So this is nepotism, then. He found people who had been useful in Sarn, College Masters, his parents. He moved on to people they knew, for his parents had their mercantile contacts; scholars knew other scholars, who in turn knew someone who . . .
Eujen himself did nothing save point people at other people, and point people at problems, and he waited for someone to look at him and demand to know what gave him the right.
When the people he was pointing at each other had differences or came to blows, he intervened. To his lasting amazement, they listened to him bluster, nodding soberly. If he voiced a thought, that opinion of his seemed to manifest almost as a physical thing, with weight and impetus.
Nothing was working. Everything was still falling apart. Except, each morning, it was all still falling apart just as the day before, barely any worse at all. He was a dam against the entropy that would lead to collapse, anarchy, starvation.