The Seal of the Worm by Adrian Tchaikovsky

two. She saw no shields, no bows, no spears, though a few had slings dangling from their long-fingered hands.
    She realized that she could not tell their gender, for they had nothing to their faces or their spare frames to tell her one way or another. Even that was a trivial thing: watching them as they coursed in their groups across the levels of Cold Well, the wrongness in every motion cried out to her.
    They do not move like humans of any kinden . They did not move like humans at all. They walked on two legs, held blades in their hands, had eyes to see with, but the unavoidable impression was that these were not men: that these human figures were the puppets of something utterly other that was rushing them this way and that. No – rather that the entire group was a single puppet linked invisibly, the slaves of one alien mind.
    She felt ill, sick to her stomach just to see it, and Maure was clutching at her arm, swaying.
    ‘It is the tax!’ Darmeyr boomed. ‘They are not seeking our guests, Atraea. The tax is come!’
    Che glanced back at the pinned Moth, seeing her head shake, despite the razor point of Tynisa’s blade there.
    ‘It cannot be,’ she got out. ‘Too early. They have been here already! We have paid our tax!’
    ‘What do we do?’ The huge Mole Cricket sounded utterly impotent. ‘What can we do? That is what they are demanding. Look – I see the priest. He is coming this way.’
    ‘Priest?’ Che demanded. ‘What’s . . .’ The word was familiar from her studies, a holdover from ancient, primitive times: beliefs that even the Inapt would not consider these days. Except . . .
    ‘He is coming here,’ Darmeyr said, shaken. ‘He will want you to give the order.’
    Tynisa made a judgement and stepped back, and then Thalric allowed the Moth woman to get up. Her unguarded expression was piteous to behold.
    ‘We need to get out,’ the Wasp said, but Esmail protested, ‘They’ll see us. They’re all over this place.’ He hissed through his teeth. ‘I should have seen them sooner, but they move so fast.’
    ‘And we need to move fast, too. How far does this go? Can we hide back here?’ Thalric demanded.
    Atraea was staring at them, and perhaps she was wondering whether this ‘tax’ of theirs could be offset by handing over the strangers.
    ‘If they find them here, they will blame you,’ Messel put in, plainly sensing the same.
    ‘Then hide,’ the woman spat, almost in tears. ‘Hide, and hear, if you are truly outsiders.’
    Che fell back into the cave, retreating further into its depths until they were out of sight of the entrance. In moments they heard the rapid patter of bare feet as the Worm arrived.
    ‘Speaker,’ snapped a hoarse voice, an old man’s voice.
    Atraea’s reply was meek. ‘Scarred One.’
    And Che could not stop herself. She inched forwards, despite Thalric frantically plucking at her sleeve. She edged and edged, quiet as could be, until she could put an eye round the corner and look.
    A single unit of the Worm soldiers was entering Atraea’s domain, half of them still outside but a chain of men already coiling inwards. None of them looked at the Moth, or at anything else. Che had no sense that they had any actual presence as individuals at all.
    She identified the male speaker at once, though. He was of that same kinden as the rest, but he wore robes of chitin scales stitched into that hardwearing cloth they all used here. He was old, and his features were sufficiently distinct from those of his underlings that he might almost have been of a different race altogether. Most striking were the scars, though: long, curling, puckered lines that had been scored across his face and down his forearms, then left to heal badly, so that the skin had cracked into jagged darts on either side of the original mark, and the whole resembled . . .
    And she saw it then, at his feet, a long, sinuous, weaving shape. It must have been five feet in length, and she felt an instinctive