Shadows of the Apt 10 - Seal of the Worm by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Published: 2014-01-16T14:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Seven

The clear light of morning uncovered a scene of ruin encompassing a score of Helleron’s streets, a blot of rubble, broken earth and the shattered remains of lives that straddled the border between the close-packed tenements of the poor and the grand townhouses of the rich.

The militia were out in force now, picking over the rubble, but old habits died hard and the money that turned all the wheels of the city took disasters in its stride. Far more men were engaged in recovering the property of magnates than were searching for the bodies of factory workers or their families.

What few bodies remained, at least. There had been plenty of eyewitnesses to testify that this had been no mere earthquake. An intelligence had been at work, a human face to the catastrophe.

‘An attack,’ murmured Colonel Nessen of the Consortium. He was a lean, hungry-looking man, adviser to the Helleren Council of Thirteen and de facto Imperial governor, an authority unchallenged so long as he allowed the magnates to retain their illusions by not formally assuming the title.

‘Who from?’ Scordrey demanded. The merchant, one of the most powerful in Helleron, had been elsewhere in the city when the earth had broken open. Only servants had died in his house. Already he was speaking about rebuilding, and about clearing away all those fallen tenements, putting the space to some more wholesome use than simply housing the poor.

‘Enemies of the Empire; enemies of Helleron,’ Nessen prompted. As a Consortium man he was a merchant first, of course, but he had a soldier’s basic training and rank badge, and he found the gap between his perspective and that of the Beetle beside him widening even as they spoke.

‘Such as who? The Lowlanders are all engaged by your forces, and this isn’t exactly the sort of thing Collegium or Sarn would do. Or do you think the Spiders accomplished this somehow? Or the Moths? Some of my fellows have been saying it was the Moths, but we both know that the scale of this thing is beyond the ability of any human agency.’

‘It wasn’t the Moths,’ Nessen replied tonelessly. He knew it was not the Moths, because a very shaken ambassador from Tharn had sought him out under the Moths’ rather tenuous alliance with the Empire and had stated that a similar incursion had occurred into the deepest levels of Tharn itself. The Moth had not said who the attackers were, but Nessen recognized fear when he saw it.

‘It was an earthquake.’

‘We have reports—’

‘Looters brawling in the wreckage!’ Scordrey declared stridently.

Nessen honestly could not have said whether the man was trying to convince himself or whether he had already succeeded. The Wasp turned away in disgust and headed back to the house the Empire had rented for him.

He got a messenger off to Capitas, asking for . . . He had not known what to ask for. He had only reported, and left it to wiser heads to work out what response could possibly be made to the patently impossible.

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