Seal of the Worm (Shadows of the Apt, #10)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘She is a scholar of Collegium.’ The words came to Tynisa quite readily. ‘A freer of slaves, caller of ghosts, speaker of words.’ The moment teetered on the edge of solemnity before Thalric put in, ‘Too many words, mostly.’

A beautiful abomination, Drephos had been: never to be repeated or to be equalled. A man who cared nothing for kinden or the purity of blood, but for merit only. He had put Collegiate Masters to shame with his egalitarian attitudes. If you could, if you were a brother or a sister of the engine and the gear train, the refining vat and the forge, then you had worth to Drephos, no matter what else.

Military historians would have to invent whole new words for how appalling the slaves of the Worm were in war.

War forges a people, or breaks them, and you see the quality of their metal when you bring it under the hammer. When my people had to go to war, they broke. I saw people leading armies who had no right to. I saw princes and nobles shatter under the strain, and the sharp pieces of their bad decisions kill hundreds of others.

And Ernain would take his Auxillians, stripping away a little short of half the Imperial army’s strength. The lesser half, most Wasps would say, but half was half. Numbers weren’t everything, but they were something no general would go without if he had the chance.

‘Progress is what an engineer should wish for. If a thing does not work, you redesign it until it does. If a thing could work better, it’s the same. And if you do not advance in this way –’ now he was shouting over Lien’s orders to be silent – ‘if you become fond of yesterday’s designs even though they no longer function, then you will fail. Only by changing and bettering ourselves can we survive.’

The Lots were not so very far off, and any embarrassment now would be raked up when the time came for people to consider whether they still wanted him around. The fact that he was thinking in such terms vaguely disgusted him, but at the same time he felt considerably more sympathetic to those who had gone before.

He wasn’t sure whether sending a man-eating predator along to a conference of powers meant that the Mantis-kinden hadn’t quite understood modern diplomacy or that they understood it all too well.