The Seal of the Worm by Adrian Tchaikovsky Page B

and they were lowering angular lattices of chitin struts on ropes.
    ‘Containers, for the tax,’ Che corrected, desperately. ‘Not cages.’
    There was activity from further away down the chasm of Cold Well, where the cages had already descended. It was coming closer. She could hear the sobbing and crying start up again.
    ‘Cages,’ repeated Esmail grimly.
    ‘But they’re so small . . .’ Che started, and at last her eyes could hide it from her no longer. She watched as a Beetle woman held up a child of no more than two, tears running down her face. A soldier of the Worm snatched the infant from her and passed it back down the chain towards one cage, in which another two children already crouched, crying, arms thrust through the gaps towards their helpless parents.
    ‘They’re just . . . handing them over,’ Che whispered. She saw plenty of reluctance, even some fights between parents before the inevitable surrender, but as the Worm passed through the people of Cold Well, they were making that impossible choice. Each family was selecting its least favourite son for the cull, offering up its own flesh and blood to the Worm.
    ‘How can they? They’re . . . it’s monstrous,’ she got out.
    ‘A thousand years of defeat and resignation.’ Esmail the killer, the assassin by birth, sounded just as sick and shaken as she. ‘They are shackled, body and mind.’
    She saw Darmeyr Forge-Iron, who could have broken any of the Worm soldiers in two with his bare hands and hurled the pieces into the chasm. She saw him stare down at them, and his great frame trembled. There was a woman behind him – his mate, no doubt, and as large and powerful as he – and they had three children clustered close at their feet, a girl and two boys, hiding their faces in their mother’s skirts.
    ‘No,’ Che whispered, but the Worm was demanding, through the scarred priest its mouthpiece, and huge Darmeyr was turning to his children, his expression fixed and dreadful.
    His hand fell on the youngest of his sons, and his wife was shaking her head, but it was plain she had no answer to his blunt question: What other choice?
    So many children here – and so many of the women already growing round again with child, now she looked for it – and yet so few of four years or more. Cold Well had another resource for the Worm beyond weapons or smelted ore.
    The chasm was a cacophony of screeching infants separated from all that they knew, of children just old enough to realize what they had lost in being taken from the hands of their parents and shoved into jagged cages by the soldiers of the Worm. Che did not even ask herself what this was in aid of, what need the Worm had for such a sacrifice. There were no reasons that she could ever want to know.
    She saw Darmeyr take his son in his hands and hold him up, looking into the child’s screwed-up face, and she could not stop herself.
    In the aftermath of her cry, which had cut through even that loaded and busy air, she now had the attention of the Worm.
    ‘Go!’ Esmail hissed, about to take off along the wall back the way they had come, but the Worm were there also – all of them roused in that one moment, all of them coursing up the sides of Cold Well towards them. ‘In!’ the assassin decided, pushing Che back into Atraea’s cave mouth. ‘In, and hope these tunnels go somewhere useful.’
    But that’s mad; we’ll just get lost or— But there was Messel ahead of them, beckoning urgently. An expression had appeared on his eyeless face at last, screamed out by the set of his grimacing mouth: fear, terrible fear. His words of defiance were utterly gone.
    ‘Lead us!’ Thalric demanded, and the blind man shrugged past him, disappearing into the rear reaches of the cave and beyond, down into the warren of the mines.
    ‘No light.’ Esmail warned. ‘Hold to Maker, she can see. Beetle girl, you must go first.’
    Logic roused her from her horror and she went rushing after Messel, terrified