Around them, the whole of Salkind Way was tilting vertiginously, some buildings already toppling, as if the Empire had developed some new invisible and soundless bombing orthopter and was punishing its own city.
And she saw them, the lines of them coursing from the broken walls, from the guts of the earth, their movements swift as beasts, human in shape but not in any other way. Some carried bodies between them, but many were dragging living, screaming citizens of Collegium.
‘Away!’ insisted Laszlo, and she needed no other prompting. From that moment, she and Raullo were running, desperate to put Salkind Way behind them.
Only after they were at the doors of the College library, far enough that no outcry could reach them, did Raullo drop to his knees, wheezing, and she realized that Laszlo had not come with them.
‘Who was he?’ the artist got out. ‘The Fly? Did he make that happen?’
Sartaea te Mosca shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He was Laszlo; you know, the . . .’ A pause as she considered what she was about to say – ‘Stenwold Maker’s friend.’
The next morning they returned to Salkind Way, finding it broken and shattered as if the earth had buckled beneath its load, and yet the streets on either side lay completely untouched. There were Wasp soldiers searching the wreckage, so plainly mystified by what had happened that not even the most fervent patriot was accusing the Empire of being behind whatever had happened.
They found no bodies. Upwards of fifty people had just disappeared.
Seven
Darmeyr Forge-Iron lurched outside, dropping down a level. ‘Hide them!’ he shouted.
‘No!’ Atraea the Moth snapped back. ‘Do you think they will not take all of our people one by one until they find them? They are here because of these renegades. Messel and his dreams have brought this upon our heads. Here! They are here!’ She was calling out into the great chasm, even as Che craned her neck, trying to see what was going on.
Thalric leapt on the Moth and threw her to the ground, and when she opened her mouth again he slapped her across the face, hard enough to whip her head about. He had his palm out to her in threat, but it was plain she did not realize what he meant by it. Before Atraea could denounce him, before she drove him to kill her, Tynisa had the point of her blade to the woman’s throat.
‘No more sound from you,’ she warned, and the Moth’s white eyes glared at her and the Wasp, but she said nothing.
The chorus of wails and cries was passing down the length of the scar that was Cold Well, gathering in volume as more throats joined it. Not pain, Che thought. Not panic or even fear, but grief, sheer grief and loss. She had never heard anything like it, and the rebounding echo of the rock walls made it all the worse. She felt as though this was the cry of some great beast that was approaching, a creature it would be death even to look upon.
Her Art shouldered aside the darkness, and she saw the Worm.
Just men, of some unknown kinden, save that nothing about them said ‘human’ apart from their shape. They moved in bands of a dozen or two dozen, and they were swift when they were not completely still. Each body of them was pale, no taller than she and narrower at the shoulder. Their hair and skin were all of the same colourless hue, their eyes so pale that the white shaded into the pale grey of the iris, the mid-grey of the pupils, without any hard distinction. They wore armour of overlapping plates that left their limbs mostly bare and low helms with jagged cheek-guards. For weapons they had swords a little longer than she was used to, but still unremarkable except that most of them carried two. She saw no shields, no bows, no spears, though a few had slings dangling from their long-fingered hands.
She realized that she could not tell their gender, for they had nothing to their faces or their spare frames to tell her one way or another. Even that was a trivial thing: watching them as they coursed in their groups across the levels of Cold Well, the wrongness in every motion cried out to her.
They do not move like humans of any kinden. They did not move like humans at all. They walked on two legs, held blades in their hands, had eyes to see with, but the unavoidable impression was that these were not men: that these human figures were the puppets of something utterly other that was rushing them this way and that. No – rather that the entire group was a single puppet linked invisibly, the slaves of one alien mind.
She felt ill, sick to her stomach just to see it, and Maure was clutching at her arm, swaying.
‘It is the tax!’ Darmeyr boomed. ‘They are not seeking our guests, Atraea. The tax is come!’
Che glanced back at the pinned Moth, seeing her head shake, despite the razor point of Tynisa’s blade there.
‘It cannot be,’ she got out. ‘Too early. They have been here already! We have paid our tax!’
‘What do we do?’ The huge Mole Cricket sounded utterly impotent. ‘What can we do? That is what they are demanding. Look – I see the priest. He is coming this way.’
‘Priest?’ Che demanded. ‘What’s . . .’ The word was familiar from her studies, a holdover from ancient, primitive times: beliefs that even the Inapt would not consider these days. Except . . .
‘He is coming here,’ Darmeyr said, shaken. ‘He will want you to give the order.’
Tynisa made a judgement and stepped back, and then Thalric allowed the Moth woman to get up. Her unguarded expression was piteous to behold.
‘We need to get out,’ the Wasp said, but Esmail protested, ‘They’ll see us. They’re all over this place.’ He hissed through his teeth. ‘I should have seen them sooner, but they move so fast.’
‘And we need to move fast, too. How far does this go? Can we hide back here?’ Thalric demanded.
Atraea was staring at them, and perhaps she was wondering whether this ‘tax’ of theirs could be offset by handing over the strangers.
‘If they find them here, they will blame you,’ Messel put in, plainly sensing the same.
‘Then hide,’ the woman spat, almost in tears. ‘Hide, and hear, if you are truly outsiders.’
Che fell back into the cave, retreating further into its depths until they were out of sight of the entrance. In moments they heard the rapid patter of bare feet as the Worm arrived.
‘Speaker,’ snapped a hoarse voice, an old man’s voice.
Atraea’s reply was meek. ‘Scarred One.’
And Che could not stop herself. She inched forwards, despite Thalric frantically plucking at her sleeve. She edged and edged, quiet as could be, until she could put an eye round the corner and look.
A single unit of the Worm soldiers was entering Atraea’s domain, half of them still outside but a chain of men already coiling inwards. None of them looked at the Moth, or at anything else. Che had no sense that they had any actual presence as individuals at all.
She identified the male speaker at once, though. He was of that same kinden as the rest, but he wore robes of chitin scales stitched into that hardwearing cloth they all used here. He was old, and his features were sufficiently distinct from those of his underlings that he might almost have been of a different race altogether. Most striking were the scars, though: long, curling, puckered lines that had been scored across his face and down his forearms, then left to heal badly, so that the skin had cracked into jagged darts on either side of the original mark, and the whole resembled . . .