‘Darmeyr Forge-Iron,’ he confirmed.
‘Cheerwell Maker,’ she offered. He accepted the name as though it was something of great value.
Beyond that gaping opening was a chamber barely of sufficient size to fit them all, even with Forge-Iron in the very doorway, and two narrower tunnels twisted off into the rock, canting downwards towards a faint but constant sound of tapping and digging.
Is the whole place a mine? Che wondered. Do they just sleep in the galleries and chambers, like vagabonds?
‘Where are you from?’ the Moth woman demanded, without ceremony.
Che found that the others were looking to her to speak. ‘I am Cheerwell Maker. I come from . . .’ She wanted to say up, but of course the precise direction of the sunlit world she knew was a matter of magical theory rather than pointing. ‘Outside,’ she finished. ‘From under the sun.’
The Moth stared at her bleakly. ‘Liar.’
‘It’s true,’ Messel insisted, and she hissed at him.
‘Renegade,’ she spat. ‘Shirker and abandoner, what would you know? They are fugitives from some other hold, some mine or forge whose toil they could not stand.’
‘Look at them,’ murmured Darmeyr. ‘They bear weapons, and they wear . . . and their kinden.’
‘Their very tread on the stone is different,’ Messel agreed.
‘Listen to me,’ Che insisted. ‘We come from outside here, and we must return there.’
The Moth laughed bitterly. ‘Of course. Fly there then, outsiders. Or step there through the cracks in the rock. Or perhaps you will ride the White Death there. Surely you can return there as easily as you came.’
‘We came by magic,’ Che said, matter-of-factly. ‘There was a seal that held this place closed, and it was broken . . .’ She stopped. The Moth had both hands up, fingers crooked as though trying to cram her words back down her throat.
‘There is no magic,’ declared the Moth-kinden with absolute assurance.
In the silence that followed, they digested this.
‘Magic . . .’ Che began, shaken.
‘Magic is a lie,’ the woman insisted fiercely. ‘It is a trick of the mind. There is no magic. Only madness lies that way. It is a fool’s story.’
Maure held her hand to her mouth in abject horror.
‘I can assure you there is magic,’ Che stated, wondering at that same moment whether it was herself she was trying to convince. ‘Here it is . . . less than it was. There is something wrong with this place. It ebbs, it’s true, and sometimes it is hardly there at all, but I still feel it, just. There is magic.’
‘No,’ the Moth whispered. ‘It’s a lie. It has always been a lie.’ She was shaking slightly, and Che made a sudden connection with her, a moment’s clarity, magician to magician. In that painful instant she saw a life of decades lived, inheritrix of a grand magical tradition but born into a place with nothing but the blown dust of exhausted sorcery to fuel her. She saw that the Moth’s occasional sense of a wider, grander world was dismissed as a delusion, a lie; it was a path easier to follow than having to face what had been lost.
‘Atraea,’ the Mole Cricket spoke. ‘Ask them.’
The Moth stared at Che with equal parts fear and hatred, obviously desperate to hurt her, to erase her and bury the truth of her, but she stayed her hand.
‘What will you do?’ she demanded at last. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Something was broken,’ Forge-Iron recalled. ‘She said a seal . . . Are you here to mend it? What is it that has broken?’
And, even as Che opened her mouth to answer, his next words were: ‘Have you come to fight the Worm?’
‘Yes!’ Messel crowed. ‘Why else are they here? We have all heard the forbidden tales: that our ancestors were imprisoned, punished for their ways, but that there would come our kin from outside, who would redeem us, who would rescue us. What else could they be but that?’
‘Lies!’ the Moth, Atraea, shouted desperately. ‘There is no truth in prophecy. It serves only to lead fools astray. And there is no fighting them, our masters.’
‘The Worm,’ Darmeyr insisted.
‘You must not say that. You must say, “our masters”, or say nothing at all. Do you think they will not take even you, if they overhear—!’ Atraea was becoming more and more agitated.
‘Listen to me. We must spread the word of their coming,’ demanded Messel, and Forge-Iron was insisting, ‘I will say Worm, and I will say they can be fought,’ and then he cried out, a yelp of pain that seemed ludicrously high from such an enormous man, and backed hurriedly out of the opening.
Esmail was there, lean and tense against the shadows and the firelight.
‘Trouble,’ he snapped. ‘Get out, now.’
Already they could hear a commotion outside that their argument had blotted out. A gathering wail of dismay was rising from many throats, from all the way down the chasm of Cold Well.
‘It is them,’ Atraea said, dead-faced. ‘Your loose talk has brought this upon us.’ And then: ‘No, they have brought it. What else can it be? These “outsiders” have summoned our doom.’
Five
The wife of the governor of Solarno had been out the whole day, and the evening too, and Gannic’s informers strongly suggested that she had been meeting covertly with agents of . . . well, his spies weren’t that good but he’d bet that it was certain of the local Spider Aristoi. They would be constantly weaving, daily patching the accord that they had secretly stitched together to keep Solarno out of the war.
As for the governor himself, he was a Consortium man, a merchant and not a soldier – but either he was the most blinkered buffoon ever to get a colonel’s rank badge or he had the rare attitude in a Wasp of being prepared to let his wife get on with things. After all, Spiders would always have more respect for a woman across the negotiating table.
Insane that we ever allied with them, even for as long as we did, Gannic reflected, and not for the first time, but the cautious détente here in Solarno showed that anything was possible.
Since just before sundown, Gannic had been an unannounced guest in the governor’s townhouse, hiding from the servants and settling in while the place turned in for the night around him. He was amused to discover that Edvic and his wife occupied separate rooms, but then perhaps that was part of the unique way that they worked together, and certainly it seemed to have served them well so far.
So, time to kick over the barrel. After all, he had his instructions from Colonel Varsec, who was keen to meet the woman who had bridged the Wasp–Spider gap, that everywhere else had ripped apart into open warfare.
The house as a whole had gone to bed by the time the governor’s wife got in. Gannic held very still as he listened to her dismiss the last few servants who had waited up for her return, and then she entered her chambers. It was late, she was tired, and Gannic hid himself well. She considerately lit only a single candle before casting off her robe, obviously worn out by the diplomatic demands of her day.
Time to introduce myself. Gannic had inherited the dark-seeing Art of his Beetle mother, and he had to admit that Merva was a fine piece of work, as tall and elegant as any Spider woman, hair of gold and skin perhaps paler than he liked it, but he could imagine her matching the Aristoi pose for pose as they trod their diplomatic tightrope together.