Seda was about to respond with some flippant rejoinder calculated to restore her place at the heart of the universe, but another look at these men gave her pause. They had a gravity, a history to them that Gjegevey’s words only scratched the surface of. Beetles and Mole Crickets, yes, but there was a scent of the Old Times about them such as she had never known from the Apt. She had thought that working in a salt mine would be a punishing experience, something that destroyed men, but the miners before her seemed hardened, preserved almost, few of them young and yet all of them strong.
‘Show me what you have brought me here for,’ she ordered, and Gjegevey twitched and bowed, and went shuffling past the kneeling miners, with Seda in his wake and Tisamon following like a steel shadow. As her soldiers moved to accompany her, she held a hand up to halt them.
‘No further,’ she told them. ‘Await my return.’
‘But Majesty-’ began their captain.
‘Should I fear? These are my subjects.’ Her gesture encompassed the miners. In truth it was no great risk, for Tisamon would brook no harm to her, and she trusted his reflexes more than all the soldiers of the Empire. Still the captain hovered reluctantly, and she read strange things in the uppermost level of his mind. Not a concern for her wellbeing, not a devotion to his duty, but a need to know so that reports could be made. He was one of the new men, she realized.
Well, your paymaster shall remain ignorant. ‘You will stay here,’ she ordered, and then turned and followed Gjegevey into the gloom of the mine.
The lights of the Coretsy mine burned with green and blue flames leaping behind glass. Gjegevey had explained that more sophisticated lighting suffered too much from the salt that ate into machinery, so that much of the mine working was still done in ways that the Moth-kinden of old would have recognized. Even so, there were rails set into the floor, and she could hear the deep thump of pumps. Their path took them away from the sounds of machinery and picks. The miners no longer worked the gallery that Gjegevey was leading her to, nor had they for longer than any records showed.
‘And I can take it that it was not simply because they ran out of salt,’ Seda remarked drily.
‘Majesty we are, mn, surrounded by salt: the walls, the ceiling.’ He managed a wan smile. ‘Taste, if you, ah, do not believe me.’
Two miners were waiting ahead by some manner of device, one of them a Beetle holding a spitting, greenish-purple lantern. The other, standing in his shadow, was a slender creature, pale-skinned, blank eyed: a Moth-kinden. Seda raised an eyebrow at Gjegevey, but he simply stepped onto a platform on the contraption, and she realized that it must be some manner of lift.
When she had joined him — and reluctantly now, for this sort of travel did not suit her — the lamp was passed to Gjegevey. Once Tisamon was at her shoulder, some unseen signal sent their platform plummeting into darkness.
‘Yes, there are, hm, Moths here,’ his quiet voice said, as they descended. ‘They are the descendants of the overseers, the masters. They dwell entirely within the earth and seldom venture above. This is a place of power, just as you, ah, sought, but I will try to persuade you to look elsewhere. All the, hm, power that the salt and its traditions can muster is committed to what you are about to behold.’
Without warning, the narrow shaft they had been dropping through was gone, the walls opening into a cavern so broad that the lantern light barely scraped its sides, glittering on them, dreamlike, with unnatural colours. Gjegevey held it out at the full length of his thin arm, tilted so that the light fell below them, even as the lift swung and jolted, swinging in a wide spiral as it slowed.
Seda looked down. There, not quite directly beneath them, was what she had come to see. There was no mistaking it, for in the centre of the rock floor — no, the petrified salt of the floor — was a great disc of dark stone, easily ten feet across. It glistened as the light caught it, some peculiarity of its material making it seem wet. She saw the design that had been cut into it: a spiral of beads, each bead crossed through, and at its centre that three-pronged claw, or head.
‘The Seal of the Worm,’ she breathed.
‘None other,’ Gjegevey conceded softly. ‘Not the first and greatest of them, by any means, for that is lost to record, but a Seal nonetheless. Now, Majesty, your senses far exceed my own, both mundane and magical. You are, I am, mn, sure, quite alive to the invisible world. Would you now descend to step upon the seal?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Do you doubt my courage?’
He shook his head and at that moment the lift touched down onto the greyish stone-like salt of the cavern floor. With a halting step he was out, and another had taken him past the rim of that circular carving, onto the face of the Seal itself. Looking back, he extended a hand. ‘Majesty?’
She felt for Tisamon’s response and sensed, beyond his usual thorns of suspicion, a thread of fear. But of course Mantis-kinden had been virtually bred to defer to magicians, which was why they had been such valued servants to the Moths, and why the dead man was in her thrall now.
And Gjegevey had dared to walk there, so her choice was either to match him or have him killed. She wondered if he appreciated the position he had put her in.
She was ready for a great deal as she stepped onto that great coin of inscribed stone, reaching out for the lessons in magic that must surely be buried beneath it. But instead she found… absence, nothing, a faint aftertaste of power about the edge of the disc, but nothing more. Her reaction must have shown in her face, for Gjegevey was nodding.
‘The great war against the Worm was different, as you divined; different enough to draw my people into it. There were two reasons that we took up arms that single time. One was that our own kin, our cousins, were threatened, already in the Worm’s shadow, but even for that reason we might not have stirred. We were slow to anger, even when we, ah, possessed the might to make that anger felt. The truth was the nature of our enemy, or so I deduce. The war with the Worm broke us as a power in the world, humbled us and reduced us. Our records from that time and before are, hm, incomplete.’ His voice betrayed a scholar’s horror. ‘Our very culture suffered wounds; some records were lost, whilst others, hm… our libraries hold the knowledge but will not, ah, disclose it, the pain is still too great.’
‘The nature of your enemy?’ Seda echoed sceptically. ‘They were wicked magicians, like the Mosquitos? Deceivers like the Assassins? Perhaps they were simply a great and conquering empire?’ She smiled, but with a touch of steel.
‘We wrote that they did not seek to plunder or to conquer, nor to control, nor even achieve such mundane ends as to, ah, kill or to enslave. The Worm had one intent in those days: to make all others like itself in all ways.’
‘If this is a thinly veiled attack on some point of Imperial foreign policy, then you are being far too elaborate. I am quite sure your people find our Auxillians and subject cities distasteful. No doubt this is why we have an Empire and they do not.’ But Seda’s vitriol was automatic, even defensive. Something in Gjegevey’s words had struck an uneasy chord within her, some inner understanding that must have accompanied her Inaptitude.
‘Your slave cities cannot be compared to it,’ Gjegevey told her, somehow managing to stress that word without in the least condemning it. ‘The Worm killed and enslaved, of course, but our writings say that the Worm’s true goal was to simply, mn, overwrite all other cultures, to obliterate all trace of any otherness, and to leave behind nothing but the Worm. I cannot say how this was accomplished, save that it sufficiently provoked my kin that we went to war and paid a great cost: the very future of our kinden as a great people. The Moths and the Mosquitos recovered. We, mn, never did.’