The Seal of the Worm Read Online Free PDF

from where she lodged. That left her just enough time to cover the ground.
    Eujen was awake when she got there, which was just as well. They were sharing the storeroom of a machinist whose spare stock had been eaten up by the appetites of the war. It would have been intimate, had they not also been sharing it with a drunken Spider and a pair of printers whose presses had been smashed by the Empire.
    He had got himself dressed, although it must have taken him some effort, and his robes were twisted about him, with nothing hanging straight. He occupied the room’s only chair as she came in, using a crate as a writing desk, crossing out as much as he put down. A speech, probably, knowing him.
    He looked up sharply as she entered. He had recovered a lot of his colour in the last month, although there was still a greyness about his eyes and cheeks.
    ‘Is it Milus?’ he demanded. ‘Has he—?’
    ‘He hasn’t anything, at the moment,’ she told him, because Eujen had been waiting for word from the Sarnesh tactician. ‘It’s deliveries. You said you wanted to be there this time.’
    ‘Right.’ He put a hand out for his sticks, which as usual he had managed to leave out of reach somehow. She let him stretch for them because he hated it when she would not let him win these battles against his own weakness. At last he snagged them, and levered himself upright, wrestling their padded forked upper ends under his arms.
    That looked easier even than yesterday. Eujen was, after all, one of the lucky ones. He had gone to death’s country, to the very border, stared at its grey horizon and then turned back. Instar, the drug that the Collegiate chemists had concocted during the war, had worked its kill-or-cure miracle with his failing body. He would, however, never be quite the same – never quite rid of the injuries or the effects of the drug. He would be stronger, but he would probably not walk again without the crutches, or so the doctors said. There were many who were not even that lucky.
    ‘We’re going to Milus tomorrow,’ he told her, setting off on the long voyage to the doorway.
    ‘Are you?’
    ‘Whether he wants to see us or not,’ he said firmly.
    ‘He has a war to run. He’s a busy man.’
    ‘He has hundreds of our people whom he’s happy to employ in that war – our own, Mynans, Princeps. Retaking Collegium is the logical first step.’
    ‘Perhaps not to him.’ She nodded a greeting to some of the machinist’s apprentices as she and Eujen crossed the shop floor. They worked here all day and most of the night, making parts for all the machinery of war. It made sleeping difficult, at times, but it was the only place she’d found that didn’t involve climbing stairs.
    ‘The closest Imperial force is short on siege engines, all the reports agree,’ huffed Eujen, already starting to make heavy going of it. ‘So it’s not going to invest the city any time soon.’
    ‘The Second was short on siege too,’ Straessa pointed out darkly: Collegium had been taken with sheer aerial manpower and the new Sentinel automotives that the Empire had acquired. Of course, following the mysterious scattering of the Eighth, the Sarnesh had a handful of Sentinels as well.
    Step by step, they came to Bor’s Pit, and by that time Eujen’s painful progress had drawn a lot of attention. He had become a symbol, she knew. He had been a student agitator back home, then a military leader and briefly a rebel standing up against the Wasps. A great many people looked up to him, despite his young age.
    Watching him making his way, though, most of them were fighting to hide their expressions.
    The two of them were almost the last to enter the Pit, but someone would always find a seat for Eujen, one by the aisle, and Straessa stood beside it.
    There was a constant roll-call of names, personal messages from family and friends under the Wasp yoke back home, but if that was what this was about, there would have been no need for the Pit,