Almost none was of Messel’s kinden, whatever that might actually be. Those other faces were more familiar, and Che found herself searching from face to face, cataloguing the inmates of the asylum, matching them with the powers of the ancient world.
The Mole Crickets stood out most, by sheer virtue of their size. Ten-foot tall at the hulking shoulder, white haired and onyx skinned, there were more of them gathered here than Che had ever seen. She knew they had an Art to move and mould stone – even to walk through it as if it were mist – and yet here they were, huge and solemn, prisoners and slaves of the Worm like all the rest.
There were Woodlouse-kinden as well, and in fair numbers. She had seen almost none before – only the Empress’s adviser whom Esmail had killed, and perhaps one or two others. Here were dozens of them, tall and stoop shouldered with grey-banded skins and hollow faces. Here, too, were the Moths, with their blank white eyes that were still infinitely expressive compared to the vacant, socket-less faces of Messel’s pallid kin.
Here and there she saw others, belonging to kinden she could not guess at, whose alien features were never seen under the sun. All of them wore similar clothes to Messel himself: cloaks and trousers and long-sleeved tunics of thick cloth. Some had scarves about their mouths and noses, too, or hats of the same fabric, with folded tops.
But she judged that none of these would have use for the light that Cold Well was decked out with. For that, she must seek out more familiar features, for at least one in three of the denizens here was of her own kinden: the familiar dark-skinned and solid-framed people who dwelled almost everywhere in the world above and could endure anything.
Even this, this abyss, this slavery, they could endure. Abruptly it no longer seemed such a virtue.
Messel had stopped, brought to a halt by the sheer force of that massed regard; those he had led here clustered behind him, hands to weapons, unsure whether they would be welcomed or attacked or simply ignored. The air breathed with the sounds of the bellows, crackled with the distant molten metal, rang with hammers. Those at work had not paused for this novelty. They had quotas to make, perhaps, and from Messel’s account they had masters who would tolerate no slacking.
And there were young children, Che noted. They crowded around the legs of adults of all kinden –Woodlice offspring, infant Mole Crickets, Moth children and eyeless pale children and more. Many pairs of arms had a child in them, men and women both, and there was a profusion of toddlers. A surprising number of the women showed some visible stage of pregnancy. All the most natural thing in the world, save for how quiet the children all kept, and yet some part of Che’s mind was making a calculation, sensing that the mathematics behind what she was seeing here were wrong.
Messel spoke, not loud, but there was precious little competition from his audience. ‘Well, will nobody welcome me?’ He had his long hands spread, inviting censure or approbation, or anything other than this endless silent stare.
‘What have you brought, Messel?’ The speaker was a Moth woman, though it took a moment for Che to pick her out from the crowd. She bore a staff, just a plain length of worked chitin, but apparently this was all that was needed to be marked as headwoman of Cold Well.
‘Strangers,’ he replied evenly, seeming to brace himself.
‘There are no strangers.’
‘Strangers,’ Messel repeated, more firmly. ‘From outside.’
A dreadful murmur went through everyone there, as though he had said something terrible, broken some unspeakable taboo. Che saw plenty of heads shaking in outright deniaclass="underline" there is no outside. How many generations of their ancestors had been sealed away down here?
And then she asked, out loud though she had not intended to, ‘Why are there so few children?’
In the echo of her words, all eyes were upon them.
‘Che, they’ve got the little maggots underfoot all over,’ Thalric pointed out tactfully.
‘But the older children,’ she replied. ‘So many babies and . . . look.’
And she was right, of course: that was what had been nagging at her. All those babes in arms, and yet few children who were older than three or four. Even as she said it, she felt a crawling sensation inside her that no matter how barren and bleak this place had shown itself to be, there was an unplumbed depth of terrible revelation just waiting for her.
One thing she had achieved: even to ask the question – the answer to which was surely a constant burden to all here – had established their credentials.
‘Outside,’ the Moth woman repeated, staring.
This time Che actually heard someone say it: ‘There is no outside. It’s a lie.’
‘Speak to them,’ Messel insisted. ‘Where is the Teacher? Has he come? He must see them.’
‘Wandering,’ the Moth replied dismissively.
‘No, he must be here,’ Messel insisted, too loud. ‘I sent . . . he was to come . . .’
‘Well, he has not come,’ the woman spat derisively, and it was plain such a failure to appear matched her general opinion of this ‘Teacher’. ‘Bring them after me. I will speak to them. There is no avoiding it. Messel . . .’ She hissed, sharp and distinctive, and Che guessed it was to convey the glower that he could not have seen. ‘This will fall on your head, the consequences of this.’
Their blind guide spread his hands again. The division between these two was plainly an old one.
The Moth turned round sharply, and the other dwellers of Cold Well got out of her way. She half scrambled, half flew to one of the openings and looked back, gesturing for them to follow. ‘And the rest of you, back to your work,’ the woman rasped. ‘You think this changes anything? You think this is anything to gawp at? Forget these strangers, they will be gone as soon as they came. They are nothing.’
Che had hoped that there would be some groundswell of resistance to this dismissive attitude, but already the onlookers were skulking away, vanishing back to their holes or else sloping off towards the gleaming fires of the forges. She tried to catch the eyes of some of her kin, to establish that connection they must surely feel with her, but they would not look at her – indeed they barely looked at each other.
She was halfway after the Moth woman, almost wilting herself under that imperious glare, when Thalric said, ‘What about him? He’s coming too?’
One of the crowd had not simply gone home. Che looked over and saw a vast figure, a Mole Cricket bigger even than his fellows, each of his arms greater than Che’s whole body, and reaching nearly to his knees. He wore a cap of hide and chitin, and the hammer thrust into a loop at his belt must have weighed as much as an ordinary man.
‘Go,’ the Moth told him, but he shook his head.
‘I’ll hear this, for my people.’
‘Forge-Iron, go. This is a fiction, a nothing.’
He strode over to her, his shadow eclipsing the entire opening that she stood in. ‘Let us be peaceable about this,’ he said mildly, though even then Che felt the rumble of his voice through the soles of her feet. For a moment he and the Moth were frozen, locking wills, and Che felt the woman’s Art sally forth to put the Mole Cricket in his place, but he was immovable, like the rock itself, and at last she sagged and nodded and vanished inside.
The huge man waited until the travellers had followed her in before bringing up the rear.
‘Forge-Iron?’ Che enquired, looking up into that dark face, meeting his curious gaze.