They had slept down here more than sixty times by anyone’s best guess, although Maure cautioned that, divorced from the world beyond, even the passing of time might not be the same. The halfbreed necromancer had little to offer save prophecies of doom, it seemed. Che had found it hard to believe that they could have been trapped in some small prison for so long without escape or capture, but she had misunderstood the scale of their surroundings. The world of the Worm was a world indeed. What she had seen from the ledge, with Cold Well spread out in the middle distance, was but a single segment of the Worm’s domain, and Cold Well but a single community amongst dozens of similar slave towns. The Worm had its lightless empire.
Messel himself moved surely, crouching low and often with his long fingers trailing over the stone. Some Art led him onwards, and Che began to suspect that he was hearing through the rock itself, interpreting the minute vibrations of distant motion and letting them warn and guide him.
Often they stopped, Messel leading them aside into cracks and overhangs where they could hide. He spoke little, and the supposed threats were often obscure. Once they heard wings, though – vast and slow-beating and strange. Another time, Che saw a hunting beetle, low-slung but as big as a horse, with its mandibles so long that they crossed over one another. Messel led it away, using a sling to rattle stones off its hide until it lumbered after him, then returning after a long anxious time of uncertainty to get them moving again.
Once there was the Worm.
The Worm they did not see, for Messel had found a shallow cave, and they all lay there barely daring to breathe. Messel’s manner had become agitated, almost frantic, where he had met all previous dangers with utter calm. This time he crouched alongside them, his hands clutching at his cloak as though trying to wrest some extra concealment from it. From outside they heard the scrape of armour, bare feet on stone, and Che tried to imagine some other race of blind people – but still just people no matter how fearsome their reputation. She failed to picture anything so tame. There was something about the quick, rushing movements out there – the way that, when they stopped, they stopped all at once, then set off all together. There were no words spoken at all, and Messel kept them still and quiet for a long while after the unseen Worm had gone.
‘Ants?’ had been Thalric’s suggestion. He, too, had picked up on the lack of any spoken communication in what had sounded to be a band of a dozen or so.
Che had just shaken her head. The motion of them had been something other than Ant discipline, and she felt that the silence was not due just to an Art mindlink. Why she was so certain, she could not say. It was no magical intuition though, for when the Worm had been near she had felt what little sense of magic she retained being deadened, smothered.
They have done something dreadful, she thought. Her knowledge of the Worm was scant, but she had been gifted with a vision of the forces mustering for that final battle that had seen the Worm driven beneath the earth, supposedly forever. They had been a thing to fear even then, but she compared what she had understood from that battlefield to what she had experienced just now and concluded unhappily that there was some new horror added to the Worm, some change that had been made, and not for the better.
Thalric was her crutch as they travelled under the false stars of the Worm’s sky. She could tell that he was fighting to understand where they were and what had happened to them. It was a fight he could never win, but he was a survivor. The world had tried to kill him a dozen times, leaving scars on his hide as mementos. He had passed through the hands of so many masters that he had invented a new kind of freedom all his own. And he had stayed with Che through many trials, and he smiled when he looked at her.
And he was a Wasp. That was a strange thing to find strength in, but half the time Thalric looked the world in the eye, and the rest of the time he looked down on it. He had been brought up on tales of his own kinden’s superiority, their ability to master anything. He was not exactly a good son of the Empire any more, but when she was at her lowest, feeling as though she was trapped in a pit she could not escape, his barbed wit would bring the world down to her level. He would make some cynical bleak joke of it all, and things would not be quite so bad after that.
They had camped in a crack in the earth that Messel had scouted for them, but it was too exposed for them to risk a fire and so they huddled together for warmth. Meanwhile the man kept a blind watch nearby.
Esmail was already asleep, or at least pretending to be; he seldom spoke, a private, dangerous man who lacked the past association the others shared. The underworld was left to Che, Thalric, Maure and Tynisa to face.
‘I don’t understand how anyone can have thought this place a good idea.’ Tynisa was staring up at those ersatz stars. Sometimes they saw one of the distant lights twitch and shudder, and knew that some luckless flier had been caught by it and was being reeled in.
‘They were desperate.’ Che wasn’t sure why she was defending the magicians of the ancient world, but the words came out anyway.
‘I’ve known plenty of desperate people,’ Tynisa remarked, and then: ‘I can remember when I was desperate, and the things I did, but this . . . Desperate deeds are spur-of-the-moment deeds. This took planning and patience.’
‘Power,’ put in Maure softly. ‘It took power. And when you have that sort of power, then desperation can do very different things.’
‘You’re missing the main point,’ Thalric’s acerbic tone cut in, ‘which is that the bastards who devised this place were never going to end up in it.’
That silenced them for a moment, ceding him the floor.
‘Those old Moths,’ he went on, ‘your great wizards or whatever you call them – there’s nothing inherently magical about this story. Change the trappings and it’s everyone’s. Give someone a big stick, and tell them it’s their right, and they’ll use it. Desperation just means they’ll use it harder. So we all know Moths are useless mumblers who live up mountains and wring their precious grey hands over all these machines everyone else seems to have now. But they were executing your people on a whim a few centuries ago, Che. Give someone power, and at the same time you take away any qualms they’d have about using it.’
‘Well, the Imperial subject speaks from experience,’ Tynisa said acidly.
‘Yes, he bloody does,’ Thalric agreed hotly. ‘We know there’s no slave that wouldn’t wield the lash if you gave him the chance. It’s only Collegium that thinks there’s some mythic moral superiority.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ Che reproached, her eyes searching his face in the darkness. She saw the flaws there, the lines of doubt his association with her had marked out: the certainty in his voice was betrayed by his naked expression.
Still, he came back with, ‘Che, since I met you, you’ve no idea how many stupid things I’ve had to believe.’ And she laughed at him then, feeling the weight of that buried place momentarily lifted off her shoulders.
Later, when both Thalric and Tynisa had put their heads down, Che saw Maure stir, shivering. She reached a hand out, snagging at the halfbreed’s sleeve, thinking she must be feeling the cold, but the woman flinched back.
‘I’m sorry,’ Che murmured.
Maure stared out at that terrible sky. ‘No dead, Che. A place of death without any dead. I don’t know if you can imagine it.’