mistaking it, for in the centre of the rock floor — no, the petrified salt of the floor — was a great disc of dark stone, easily ten feet across. It glistened as the light caught it, some peculiarity of its material making it seem wet. She saw the design that had been cut into it: a spiral of beads, each bead crossed through, and at its centre that three-pronged claw, or head.
‘The Seal of the Worm,’ she breathed.
‘None other,’ Gjegevey conceded softly. ‘Not the first and greatest of them, by any means, for that is lost to record, but a Seal nonetheless. Now, Majesty, your senses far exceed my own, both mundane and magical. You are, I am, mn, sure, quite alive to the invisible world. Would you now descend to step upon the seal?’
Her eyes flashed. ‘Do you doubt my courage?’
He shook his head and at that moment the lift touched down onto the greyish stone-like salt of the cavern floor. With a halting step he was out, and another had taken him past the rim of that circular carving, onto the face of the Seal itself. Looking back, he extended a hand. ‘Majesty?’
She felt for Tisamon’s response and sensed, beyond his usual thorns of suspicion, a thread of fear. But of course Mantis-kinden had been virtually bred to defer to magicians, which was why they had been such valued servants to the Moths, and why the dead man was in her thrall now.
And Gjegevey had dared to walk there, so her choice was either to match him or have him killed. She wondered if he appreciated the position he had put her in.
She was ready for a great deal as she stepped onto that great coin of inscribed stone, reaching out for the lessons in magic that must surely be buried beneath it. But instead she found… absence, nothing, a faint aftertaste of power about the edge of the disc, but nothing more. Her reaction must have shown in her face, for Gjegevey was nodding.
‘The great war against the Worm was different, as you divined; different enough to draw my people into it. There were two reasons that we took up arms that single time. One was that our own kin, our cousins, were threatened, already in the Worm’s shadow, but even for that reason we might not have stirred. We were slow to anger, even when we, ah, possessed the might to make that anger felt. The truth was the nature of our enemy, or so I deduce. The war with the Worm broke us as a power in the world, humbled us and reduced us. Our records from that time and before are, hm, incomplete.’ His voice betrayed a scholar’s horror. ‘Our very culture suffered wounds; some records were lost, whilst others, hm… our libraries hold the knowledge but will not, ah, disclose it, the pain is still too great.’
‘The nature of your enemy?’ Seda echoed sceptically. ‘They were wicked magicians, like the Mosquitos? Deceivers like the Assassins? Perhaps they were simply a great and conquering empire?’ She smiled, but with a touch of steel.
‘We wrote that they did not seek to plunder or to conquer, nor to control, nor even achieve such mundane ends as to, ah, kill or to enslave. The Worm had one intent in those days: to make all others like itself in all ways.’
‘If this is a thinly veiled attack on some point of Imperial foreign policy, then you are being far too elaborate. I am quite sure your people find our Auxillians and subject cities distasteful. No doubt this is why we have an Empire and they do not.’ But Seda’s vitriol was automatic, even defensive. Something in Gjegevey’s words had struck an uneasy chord within her, some inner understanding that must have accompanied her Inaptitude.
‘Your slave cities cannot be compared to it,’ Gjegevey told her, somehow managing to stress that word without in the least condemning it. ‘The Worm killed and enslaved, of course, but our writings say that the Worm’s true goal was to simply, mn, overwrite all other cultures, to obliterate all trace of any otherness, and to leave behind nothing but the Worm. I cannot say how this was accomplished, save that it sufficiently provoked my kin that we went to war and paid a great cost: the very future of our kinden as a great people. The Moths and the Mosquitos recovered. We, mn, never did.’
‘The Mosquito-kinden fought for the Worm?’ Seda queried.
‘No, Majesty, they fought alongside us against it.’
That was a sobering thought, and Seda stared down at the great stone Seal beneath her feet. It still made no sense. An age of magic such as she could barely conceive of, and a grand war between magical powers of which this was a relic, and yet… nothing but a vacuum, an absence beneath her.
She felt that she was on the very brink of the truth. ‘So what happened. What do we stand on?’
‘This is all that is left of the Worm. When the Moths had defeated their armies and chased them back to their lairs, there was a, mn, choice. The realm of the Worm was beneath the ground, of course, and extended how far, ahm, no one could say. The Moths had no fear of darkness, but the atrocities that the Worm surely committed within its own halls gave pause to everyone. Whatever obscenity produced that kinden and had made them into the thing we called the Worm lay within that realm, and, hm, in the end the Moths had paid too much already to relish further fight. Instead they fell back on their strengths and devised a ritual.’ The old man’s gaunt face twisted into a painful smile. ‘You know of the great rituals of the Moths, hm? You owe your current status to one of them.’
‘The Darakyon,’ she reflected, barely breathing the word: the power of a failed ritual that had destroyed a Mantis-kinden hold, twisted an entire forest and liberated her from her former ignorance.
‘Bear in mind, then, that the Darakyon was the result of a ritual undertaken after the Apt had begun to rise, in the, mm, grey dawn that was bringing an end to the Moth-kinden’s world. Back during the War of the Worm, they had real power and, at that war’s end, they had the will to use it. They could not simply destroy their enemies, or they would have done so before, and spared us all the war. But with their victories to fuel them, their foot, hm, symbolically on the neck of their enemy, they sealed up the entrances to the Worm’s underground domain, and they banished the Worm.’
‘There is no such underground domain,’ Seda declared, but her voice shook slightly, because, after all, they were some way underground already, and she was acutely aware that Tisamon seemed to be refusing to step on the Seal. ‘Any such realm would have been uncovered through some mine or landslip, or this Worm finding some other way out. It cannot be so easy.’
‘Banished,’ Gjegevey repeated. ‘Not buried but banished. All their power, their armed force, even the wretches that they fed on — the other lightless cultures of the under-earth, my own, ah, kin included — all of them, banished and gone. Sent elsewhere, forever. So, no, hem, there is no underground domain of the Worm beneath our feet, but there was, once.’
Seda stared at him, as the greenish lantern began to gutter. ‘But
… where?’
‘Away,’ was all Gjegevey would say. ‘Just as there was a world within the Shadow Box, curving away and closed off from the real world that we know, so there is a far greater world where the Worm rules, or perhaps was unthroned there by those other luckless kinden who were exiled with it through no fault of theirs. Perhaps my own, mn, kinden have risen to a greatness there that we have been, hm, denied under the sun. But I fear that, Majesty, if you were to exercise your power and somehow undo the Seal, then you would find the Worm, and nothing but the Worm, patient and bitter, and that is why I ask you to, hm, pursue this no longer, seek this no more. Let the Seal of the Worm lie. Yes, there may be, hm, power to be gleaned there, but the lessons of history are clear. Do not wake it. Do not bring it back.’
She stared at him for a long time, still feeling that absence beneath her. His story was impossible, save that nothing else could account for that inexplicable lack that she felt, the echo of what had been. I will not fear. But she did fear — not the dread of that Beetle girl usurper or the tedious concerns of state, but a fear of the dark, and of what the dark had once hidden.
‘Find me something else, then,’ she snapped, and Gjegevey bobbed his head eagerly and gratefully.
‘I will, I will,’ he assured her. ‘Rely on me, Majesty. You shall have what you seek.’ His gratitude at having his counsel followed was abject and instant.
Twenty-Seven
Jodry was late, keeping them waiting almost an hour before he heaved his frame into view, sweating from the modest flight of steps leading to this out-of-the-way room in the College. Another meeting, yet another day in the attempts of the Collegiate government of academics and merchants to understand and master the war.
