And now the mist was blowing away.
‘We must triumph today,’ Argastos declared. ‘There must be an end to it.’
The army took shape about them, in between the scattered trees, and Che caught her breath. She had never seen such a sight, nor had anyone else for a thousand years.
The Mantis-kinden were all around them, and she realized that these were Argastos’s personal guard, all five hundred of them; and beyond them were ranged the other war bands, together making up a host of the Inapt such as she had never seen. She saw more Mantids, and groups of Moth-kinden in leather and chitin mail, with arrows to their bows. There was the glittering finery of Dragonfly nobles on horseback, lifting their long swords towards the ascending dawn and shouting out their battle cries. She saw whole blocks of armoured Woodlouse-kinden bristling with pikes and halberds, and knots of large-framed Scorpions trailed by packs of their beasts, claws agape. Haughty Spider-kinden in bright silks stalked forwards with bow and spear, giving the Mantids a wide berth. And there were more, too: here was a score of lean, lightly armoured men and women she knew for Assassin Bugs, and there — she shuddered to see them out in the morning light, but there was no mistaking those red eyes set in pallid faces — Mosquito-kinden, armed and armoured for battle, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with a dozen kinden who hated them with a passion.
And, as she kept looking, she saw the others as welclass="underline" less bright, less magical, less prominent, but gathered in numbers nonetheless. Ant-kinden with wooden shields and leather armour; Beetles — her own ancestors — in bronze mail of a style that recalled Khanaphes; Great Mole Crickets; the darting forms of Flies. Here was the whole world, and it had come to do battle.
And now there was a great woman striding between those war bands, tall as a Mole Cricket but of a less massive build, robed and partly armoured in chitin plate, pointing a staff down the hillside and calling out to Argastos, ‘War Master! They come!’
The huge woman’s helm was open, and Che looked upon her face and knew her name. Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the Thousand. Last seen by Che in the catacombs beneath Khanaphes, a millennium later, but here she was young and far from the great city of her people — a people who must already be in decline — and she had come to fight. They had all come to fight.
And Che could see, further down the hill, another host that seemed to be forming out of the very earth itself: a vast horde of armoured figures. A fear arose at the sight of them — the fear of all about her regarding that terrible enemy. She understood — because Argastos understood — that many of those out there had been their kin, somehow, before falling into darkness. For this was the army of the Worm that sought to make everything like itself.
‘Their seers block ours,’ the Woodlouse woman announced. ‘We cannot know their full strength.’
‘They are many, what else do we need to know?’ Argastos asked her. ‘We have forced them to this battle. We can hardly leave them hungry now, can we?’
The host of the Worm was beginning to move, though Che could make out scant detail of them. She saw the war bands jostle amongst themselves, archers moving forwards and readying their arrows, and the others forming no real line, nothing like a modern battle order, each war band to its own. But she understood, having been in those same shoes, that there were magicians here — many, many magicians of all kinden. Each would direct a band, and speak to his or her fellows, for thus were the wars of the Inapt conducted back in the days of great magics.
And Argastos turned to her and smiled, lifting his helm to his head. ‘You do not want to see this,’ he told her. ‘What is a battle, after all? And this battle, above all others, with no quarter given, no mercy, no call to hold until we had driven the Worm entirely from the land. And even then, even then they would not yield, but massed in their underground fastnesses and swore vengeance. And try as we might. . what could we do, other than what we did?’
She found him again, seated on a fallen tree and staring at a hole in the ground.
A change had come over him in however long the battle had lasted. His armour was battered, scales cracked and lost, and his helm had lost its crest. His robe was torn, and she saw a wound in his shoulder, now patched over with a poultice in the style of Moth medicine. The real change was in his face, though, and she wondered how many years the battle could have taken, to leave him looking so drawn and lined.
But his pale eyes discerned her, despite the fact that she was not there. ‘What else can we do?’ he asked. ‘Even now, my fellow war leaders consider my proposal. But we must win. We must have outright victory, or what was it all for?’
The hole was ten feet across and rimmed with stone, she saw, and there were soldiers there — the mixture of kinden that she had seen before. Even as she watched, some were descending — flying or climbing as their Art permitted — and others were emerging. She knew, by that same dream logic by which all knowledge came to her here, that there was still fighting taking place below, that the Worm was holding out, just as Argastos had said, and planning its return.
‘They would make us all like them,’ Argastos explained. ‘That is what they want, just segment after identical segment of a single whole, until they become the entire world.’
A small group was approaching him now, and Che studied them. Leaders, warlords and great magicians, surely: a Moth woman in a silver skullcap who must have been a Skryre; a Dragonfly prince; a Spider Arista; a Mosquito with a fluid red birthmark blemishing his pallid forehead; a Mantis Weapons-master, with a brooch that would hardly have changed by Tisamon’s day, though everything else about them was made unfamiliar by all the years that stood between their time and hers. At the back, poling himself along with a staff, another of the ponderous Masters of Khanaphes, this one a stranger to her. The mighty and powerful of this early age, and yet their attitude to Argastos was one of wary deference.
‘War Master,’ said the Moth, ‘we have thought on what you say.’ Her face was twisted with uncertainty, doubts bubbling to the surface and about to be raised, but a hand raised by Argastos brought silence.
‘Give me another option,’ he challenged them. ‘Show me another way that does not leave the Worm free to return. I will not repeat the slaughter of this war, nor would I wish it on the future.’
‘The cost,’ the Dragonfly observed. ‘You do not just condemn the Worm. Think of their slaves — and those of our own people trapped below. .’
‘And yet the more we send to rescue them, the more we lose in trying to fight the Worm on its own ground,’ Argastos replied flatly. ‘I know. Nethonwy is down there, my closest counsellor, lost trying to free her kin from the yoke of the Worm. Do not think that I don’t know, but there is no other way — and now, whilst the magicians of the Worm are weak, and cannot prevent us.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘And they gain in strength even now. We all realize this.’
They were all of them unhappy, but Che could feel them yielding to his logic. In war, sometimes one must do terrible things, but she knew that what they would enact now would be the most terrible thing of alclass="underline" a magical violation of the world never before seen, never attempted since, that would make the harrowing of the Darakyon seem like a handful of dust in comparison. In this age, with magic waxing at its highest and these great practitioners banded together — at no other time in history could such a thing have been done.
And, hearing her thoughts, Argastos looked from his allies back to her and said, ‘Be grateful, then, for that.’
The world around them was fading out, as though a curtain had been drawn over the sun. The others — those magicians of the elder days — withdrew into the gathering shadows, falling back into a history that had forgotten them, until she stood alone before Argastos in utter darkness, and her night-seeing Art could find nothing to relieve it.