Free The Seal of the Worm by Adrian Tchaikovsky Page B

it’s just another order. They still have a few armies to outfit with Sentinels.’ Totho was away from the balcony, studying reports from some of the metallurgists by lamplight, despite the bright daylight he could have had for free if he moved his desk five feet over.
    ‘And Solarno hasn’t torn itself to pieces yet, either. Everyone was saying it would. Everyone was saying we’d have our own little war around the Exalsee: Spiders and Wasps. There are plenty of troops within an easy sail. So what, I wonder . . .?’
    It sounded like a non-sequitur, but Drephos’s words always had a logic to them, the trick being to reverse-engineer the unspoken links of the chain.
    ‘They may want an anti-Sentinel weapon, of course,’ came Totho’s absent-minded reply. ‘The Sarnesh captured a few after they defeated the Eighth.’
    He read on for another few lines, but Drephos remained silent, and at last Totho glanced up.
    ‘You’re concerned over something. Not about their man who had the accident, surely?’
    ‘There won’t have been time for that news to have prompted anything,’ Drephos said dismissively. ‘But something . . . I think our new visitors will be speaking the same old words, however they disguise them.’
    ‘The Bee-killer,’ Totho identified.
    Drephos let a long pause slide by before he confirmed that, and then only with the briefest grunt. Totho heard his metal hand – that wonder of artifice – scrape on the balcony rail.
    ‘So give it to them.’
    That got the man’s attention. Drephos turned sharply, stalking back to hunch in the balcony archway, a stark silhouette against the sunlit sky. ‘You think so, do you?’
    Totho put down his reports. ‘In truth? No. But I’m not sure why you don’t.’
    ‘I’m undecided.’
    ‘Drephos . . .’ Totho stood up and crossed the room to him, trying to make out the man’s expression. ‘The march of technology, the inevitable broadening of the scope and purpose of warfare . . . Every invention that leaves our foundries has only made your words more true. I confess, the Bee-killer is still too much for me, especially since I was the one who . . . deployed it, that one time. But I’ve been waiting for you to talk me round. So, what is it?’
    The master artificer took a deep breath and returned to the balcony rail, forcing Totho to join him.
    ‘We’ve worked wonders here, haven’t we? With this place?’ And now surely Drephos was prevaricating, and that was not like him. Beneath them, Chasme was a sprawling blot on the landscape: workshops and factories; piers and docks; two airfields crowded with a bizarre assortment of fliers; tavernas and boarding houses and brothels. Actual room to live was fitted around all the rest, in alleys and cellars or crammed between buildings.
    All of it was lawless. Chasme had always been a pirate town, a pirate artificer town, long before Totho and Drephos had arrived. It had been fertile soil for them, though. The rabble of Chasme appreciated good workmanship, and although there were no definite leaders amongst them, the Iron Glove’s word spoke loudest. What Drephos wanted, Drephos got.
    ‘What are you thinking? You want this new lot to disappear? I can give the word,’ Totho suggested.
    ‘And word would then get back to the Empire,’ Drephos noted.
    Totho had never been good at talking to people, but then Drephos had never been good at listening, so they were well matched there. Eventually he went with: ‘All right, what?’
    ‘There they are.’ Drephos’s real flesh hand jabbed out towards the docks, but there was such a bustle of business there that Totho could not make out what he had spotted. Since the double invasion of Solarno, many merchants had gone elsewhere around the Exalsee with their wares or their orders, and nowhere had benefited more than Chasme.
    ‘I know you still keep spies in the Lowlands . . . in Collegium.’ Another non-sequitur, another twist of Drephos’s mind as it gained