Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Seal of the Worm

Dear Reader,

Thank you for buying this book. You may have noticed that it is free of Digital Rights Management. This means we have not enforced copy protection on it. All Tor ebooks are available DRM-free so that once you purchase one of our ebooks, you can download it as many times as you like, on as many e-readers as you like.

We believe that making our Tor ebooks DRM-free is the best for our readers, allowing you to use legitimately-purchased ebooks in perfectly legal ways, like moving your library from one e-reader to another. We understand that DRM can make your ebooks less easy to read. It also makes building and maintaining your digital library more complicated. For these reasons, we are committed to remaining DRM-free.

We ask you for your support in ensuring that our DRM-free ebooks are not subject to piracy. Illegally downloaded books deprive authors of their royalties, the salaries they rely on to write. If you want to report an instance of piracy, you can do so by emailing us: .

Very best wishes,

The Tor UK team & our authors

For Scott Young

Principal Cast

The Empire

Seda , Empress of the Wasps

General Tynan , Second Army

General Marent , Third Army

General Brugan , Rekef

General Lien , Engineers

Colonel Varsec , Engineers

Colonel Brakker , First Army

Colonel Nessen , governor of Helleron

Honory Bellowern , Beetle diplomat

Major Vrakir , Red Watch

Major Vorken , Slave Corps

Major Oski , Fly-kinden, Engineers

Captain-Auxillian Ernain , Bee-kinden, Engineers

Merva , wife of Edvic, governor of Solarno

Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic , Engineers

Tisamon , Sedas undead guardian

Collegiates and their Allies

Stenwold Maker , Beetle-kinden War Master, missing, believed dead

Straessa the Antspider , officer, Coldstone Company

Eujen Leadswell , Beetle-kinden officer, Students Company

Castre Gorenn , Dragonfly-kinden, Coldstone Company

Laszlo , Fly-kinden agent, former pirate

Kymene , Beetle-kinden commander, free Mynans

Tactician Milus , Sarnesh Ant-kinden

Sperra , Fly-kinden, agent from Princep Salma

Balkus , commander, renegade Sarnesh from Princep Salma

Sartaea te Mosca , Fly-kinden magician and lecturer

Poll Awlbreaker , Beetle-kinden artificer

Metyssa , Spider-kinden writer

Raullo Mummers , Beetle-kinden artist

Lissart , Firefly-kinden agent, prisoner of Milus

Aagen , renegade Wasp-kinden, now of Princep Salma

Others

Cheerwell Maker, Che , niece of Stenwold, magician

Thalric , Wasp-kinden renegade, her lover

Tynisa , halfbreed Weaponsmaster, Tisamons daughter

Maure , halfbreed magician

Esmail , Assassin Bug spy

Dariandrephos, Drephos , halfbreed master artificer and leader of the Iron Glove

Totho , his second, halfbreed artificer

Messel

Orothelin

The Hermit

Contents

Part One

Buried Alive

One

It was cold down in the bowels of the earth. The darkness was not the same hindrance to her that it was to her companions, but the cold she could do nothing about.

Worse than that was the absence . Born Apt in Collegium, she had no precise words for it. Perhaps the Moths might have done before her ancestors had thrown them out. To a magician, every place had its own feel. There was some additional sense thus engaged that the Apt could never guess at, and that she herself was still learning how to use. Travelling from her home city to the halls beneath Khanaphes, from the great wild expanses of the Commonweal to the tortuous knots of the Mantis forest, all these places had touched her and informed her, even if she had not realized it. There had been a constant voice, and now it was gone at best. At worst, when she strained that unnamed sense of hers to the utmost, she could hear something else.

A chanting, a susurration from the stone depths. The voice of the enemy. The voice of the Worm.

They were all in the realm of the Worm. In her rage, the Empress Seda had broken the Seal holding that common enemy in its prison domain for a thousand years. Che and her companions had been cast into that dark closed-off place.

It was still closed off, like a woodlouse clasped about itself, but uncurling now, slowly but surely. There would be cracks showing already, weak points that the Worm could pierce to cross, experimentally, into the wide world beyond. Che had thought to do the same, at first. So simple, to exercise her powers as a great magician in this magic-forged place, where surely power was concentrated and free for the taking. She would find out where the fractures were, and she would leave the Worms realm before its denizens ever realized new guests had arrived.

But that sense, that ability of hers, had fled. She could not breathe water. She could not walk through rock. The medium of this place was inimical to her powers. She, crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes as inheritrix of the ancient ways, had been cut off from her throne and from her inheritance. She was denied the Aptitude that was her birthright, and also the magic that was its replacement. Without those crutches, she fell.

Only one lifeline remained to her. She yet held on to one faint and tenuous connection back to the world, as if fate had considered her exile not cruel enough. Seda was still her sister, in some perverse, bitter way. They had been crowned at the same time. They were linked. Sometimes, unbidden, Che sensed her.

She knew, from this bond, that the doom that had befallen her and her fellows had not touched Seda. Seda was free, still out in the world.

Seda had won.

Faced with that realization, something had broken inside Che. She was aware that she had been down here now if down was even a meaningful word for where she was for some time, for days, tendays, months even. She was moved, goaded to her feet and forced onwards from place to place. The hands that shoved at her, that grabbed at her and pulled and would not let her just sit down and give up they belonged to her friends. She remembered them, distantly. She had brought them to this fate, led them here to their banishment. She would not have blamed them if they abandoned her in the dark, just left her behind. Possibly she would have preferred that, but they would not let her be.

They brought her food. It was horrible, uncooked and slimy, breaking into brittle, dry pieces in her mouth. They would not leave her alone until she had eaten. They brought her metallic-tasting water.

Sometimes she was aware that they were hunted, and then they hustled her along from hiding place to hiding place. In the depths that she inhabited her own personal prison she could not raise sufficient curiosity to care who pursued them, or why.

Let it be the Worm , was all she thought. Let it make an end of me. For surely that hideous, all-consuming monster of legend was more than equal to the task.

In those moments she listened too hard and heard that chanting, ranting echo of it, so distant and yet so potent and hateful, she knew it could do more than make an end of her: it could make an end of all the world. The Worm was a thing apart from Apt and Inapt, from mere kinden and kin. The Worm would devour the world, and Seda had given it the chance to do so.

After unknown ages, there was fire.

Che had lived with the cold and the dark within and without for so long that at first she did not understand what it was. The feel of warmth on her skin, the light so brazen, such a lure to all the dangers of this place it was like a distant beacon to her, calling her back from the lonely places where she had become lost.