Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And he lifted from behind him a rapier such as she had never seen. It was scabbarded in iridescent green that shifted and changed as the light touched it, bound with what she thought at first was brass, but then saw must be antique gold. It was shorter than her old blade, but when he put it into her ready hands she found it was heavier. The guard was crafted into interlocking shapes that might represent leaves or elytra, all in gold and dark steel and enamelled green. Her eyes seemed unable to stay still on it without turning to follow its twining lines.

  She had taken it by the scabbard, which seemed to be finely worked chitin shell, and now she reached for the hilt but Tisamon stopped her.

  ‘There are formalities,’ he told her. His hand touched the sword’s tapered pommel, which ended in a curved claw. In an instant he had pressed his palm to it, drawing a raw red line beside the ball of his thumb. She saw a drop of his blood glisten on the gilt metal.

  ‘Now you,’ he said. She opened her mouth to protest and he told her, ‘This is important. I do not ask you to believe, only to believe that I believe.’

  She gripped the scabbard just below its neck and stabbed the same metal thorn into her hand. It felt like the sting of a small insect just before the poison starts, a tingling pain. His blood, and my blood, both on my hands.

  ‘Now draw the sword,’ he directed, and she did.

  When her hand closed about the textured wood of the grip something went through her, a shock as though she had just been stabbed. Her heart lurched and for a second she felt the sword in her hands as a living thing, newly awoken. The feeling passed almost at once but her sense of wonder returned in force as she slid the blade from the scabbard.

  It was shorter than she was used to, as she had guessed from the sheath, and it did not seem to be of steel at all, but a dark metal lustreless as lead. It was thicker, too, than she had thought, tapering only in its last few inches. In her hands it was like an unfamiliar animal that might yet get to know her scent and be trained.

  ‘This is . . . old,’ she said slowly.

  ‘There are perhaps six or seven amongst my people who still have the secret of making such blades, but this one dates back to the Age of Lore, as all the best ones do.’

  ‘The when?’ It was a term she had not heard in Collegium.

  ‘Before the Apt revolution,’ Tisamon informed her.

  ‘But that’s . . . not possible.’ She looked at the weapon in her hands, gleaming only a little in the dawn light. ‘That was over five hundred years ago.’

  ‘And the forging itself occurred another hundred before that,’ he said. ‘Forged in an age before doubt. Forged in blood and belief and the purity of skill – all the things that make up my kinden. It is mine to hold and give because, though I prefer the claw, I have completed my mastership of this blade, which is the blade of your blood from mother and father both. I have undergone the rituals, stood before the judges of Parosyal and shed my blood there. One day, if you consent, I will take you there too.’

  It took her a moment to realize what he was saying. The Island Parosyal was some kind of spiritual place for the Mantis-kinden, or so she had been taught. He did not mean some mere religion. He was speaking of the Weaponsmasters, the badge he wore, the ancient order so jealously guarded.

  ‘They would never accept me,’ she said. ‘I am a halfbreed.’

  ‘If I vouch for you, if I train you, and if you are sufficiently skilled, then there will be no human voice with the right to deny you,’ he told her. ‘It is your choice, Tynisa. I am a poor father to you. I have no lands, no estate, no legacy from four and a half decades, save my trade. So it is all that I can give you.’

  And before she could cloud her mind with ‘but’s and ‘what if’s she said, ‘Yes.’

  A silence fell almost the moment that Kymene entered the room. Even Stenwold, part-way through puzzling over the charts and accounts that Tynisa had given him, paused instinctively, looking up. He caught his breath despite himself.

  He had seen her last night, of course, looking weary and dirty from the sewers. bruised from her captivity. More like a thin and underfed waif than the Maid of Myna.

  She had used her time well since, and he had no idea if she had even slept, for now she presented herself to her faithful in the way they wished to see her.

  She wore full armour, or a version of it. A conical helm and coif framing her delicate, unyielding features. A breastplate, a man’s breastplate, painted black with two arrows on it in red. One pointed towards the ground, the other towards the sky, and Stenwold read that as We have fallen. We shall rise again. She wore a kilt of studded leather tooled with silver, high greaves patterned after the breastplate, and gauntlets the same. She wore no shirt, no breeches, though, as an ordinary soldier might. Her arms and legs showed bare skin of blue-grey to remind them that she was no mere spear carrier but the Maid of Myna. Her black cloak billowed behind her as she entered.

  There was no cheer as she arrived, and Stenwold bitterly thought she deserved one until he realized what attention such noise might call down on them. Instead the cheer was in their eyes, in their faces.

  ‘Chyses,’ she began, and the man came forward almost nervously. ‘You are the one who gave me hope in the dark. I shall always remember you for it. You are dear to me, from now.’

  She clasped him by the arm and Stenwold guessed that their history had not been so amicable in the past, and it was to erase that stain that he had mounted the rescue. Chyses made to return to his place, and Stenwold saw tears glint in his eyes, but then Kymene was catching at his sleeve, keeping him at her side.

  ‘You have come here from all across the city,’ she told her audience. ‘I know most of you. I know that you are not all friends with one another, that each of you holds a revolution in your hearts that differs from your neighbour’s. You are all come here under one roof, though, when before my capture I could not bring you together. Let us thank the Wasps for that, at least.’

  A slight current of laughter, while Stenwold glanced from face to face. Old and young, men and women, Soldier Beetles of Myna and a few others, Grasshopper militia, Fly-kinden gangsters sympathetic to the cause, even a couple of ruddy-skinned Ant renegades from the conquered city of Maynes. All of them now watched Kymene and waited for her orders.

  ‘You must probably expect me to set the city alight with a single brand, to call on every man, woman and child of Myna to rise up with staves and swords to drive the Empire from us.’

  A few cries to the positive, but her tone had caught their attention, and they waited.

  ‘You know that the Bloat is dead!’ she called, to emphatic nods and savage grins. ‘But who killed him?’ she demanded of them, and that struck them dumb.

  ‘I did not slay him, not that I would have stayed my hand. Neither did Chyses, nor any of our party. Yet we all know he is dead. So who slew the Bloat?’ Her eyes fixed each in turn until one spoke.

  ‘They say he crossed another Wasp over a woman, is what I’ve heard. I heard they executed some officer for it.’

  ‘It was Captain Rauth, I heard,’ another put in. ‘The Bloat’s sneak. We won’t miss him either.’

  ‘Is that what they say?’ Kymene asked, killing the murmur of speculation that was beginning. ‘The Wasps have been fighting each other? Even as Chyses was breaking the lock of my cell, they were killing one another in the dark? Myna will have a new governor, worse no doubt than the old, and look to that man for why the Bloat was killed. For now they have put the word out that the Bloat is dead, made it very public indeed. Why is that, though? Why trumpet the news from end to end of the city, so that we all know it and can take heart from it?’

  She strode along the front row of her audience, her cloak unfurling behind her.

  ‘Which one of us does not know that our enemy possesses cunning as well as force? We have all felt it, I most of all when their mercenaries caged me! So why have they let us hear so soon that the Bloat has fallen? They have let us hear because they are
waiting for us to act. They know that we are growing strong, and they wish us to become no stronger before we strike. They are waiting for us to go to the ordinary people, and then they will put us down with fire and blood. Because we are strong but we must be stronger. The time for revolution will come, but it is not now, and the Wasps know that.’

  She had them utterly. They stared at her and Stenwold stared with them.

  ‘For many days, five tendays at the very least, there must be no murmur of resistance. They cannot stand waiting with sword raised forever. Some time they must lower the blade, and all that while we will grow stronger. Our time will come, but we must be more cunning than the Wasps in order to triumph. Strength alone will not avail us. This is why Chyses was wise to enlist these foreigners in my rescue. Those Wasps that saw them and lived, and there were few,’ a murmur of grim satisfaction at that, and several glances at Tisamon, ‘will say that it was merely some foreigners rescuing foreign prisoners. You shall pass the same story around, wherever the Wasps might overhear. Let them begin to doubt themselves. Let them lower their guard. Do nothing to hone their suspicions. You now all understand why this is?’

  And they did. Kymene was a rare speaker, Stenwold decided. She cast her words into a room of disparate and divided people, and each one was drawn closer by them, until they were all standing together before her, and she was speaking to each one and all of them.

  He still held out little hope for the Mynan revolution, but without Kymene he would have held out no hope at all.

  After she had finished rallying her troops and had sent them back to their followers and their resistance cells with her instructions, Kymene still was not finished. With no visible sign that she had been locked in a Wasp cell until the small hours of that morning, she came over and sat before Stenwold, motioning for the other foreigners to join them. They filtered in slowly: Cheerwell sitting beside her uncle with Totho a little behind her; Tynisa and Tisamon sitting close together on his other side, she still holding the sheathed blade her father had given her; Achaeos a little further back, shrouded in his robes like a sick man on a cold day.

  ‘You are a remarkable revolutionary,’ Stenwold said, putting aside the stolen Wasp papers only with reluctance. ‘I’ve known a few activists in my time, but we call them “chaotics” in Collegium, and that’s as much a testament to their own lack of cohesion as their aim in causing chaos. I can’t think of any who, in your shoes, would have counselled such patience.’

  ‘I am just a woman who loves her native city,’ Kymene said. ‘I remember your name, Master Stenwold Maker. One still hears it on occasion. You fought the Wasps during the conquest. Or you ran from them, depending on the story.’

  ‘A little of both, I fear.’

  ‘Well, all records are rewritten now. I know you came here to rescue two of your own, and that freeing me was incidental to your plans, but because you have given me back to my city, to work for its freedom again, I owe you more than I can ever pay. What I can afford to give, though, you have only to ask for.’

  Stenwold nodded tiredly. ‘Well, it would be a lovely thing to shake hands and say we are replete with what we’ll need, but I fear we must indeed call on you for help. No great demands, but help enough.’

  ‘Ask,’ she prompted.

  ‘I need a messenger, the fastest you can get, to fly to Helleron.’

  ‘It shall be done.’

  ‘I’ll have prepared a message in an hour’s time that must be taken to a man of mine there.’ He saw the worried looks of his prote´ge´s and continued, ‘I’ll explain all in a moment, but first let’s deal with what we need. I assume a flier’s out of the question.’

  She actually laughed at that. ‘To steal one from the Wasps would be to break my own instructions to my followers, and there are no fliers outside their hands. I can get you horses, though.’

  Stenwold weighed that up. ‘We ourselves have an automotive stowed outside town. Can you get us enough horses for a change of mounts halfway, and I’ll trade you the machine?’

  ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘Your line of credit extends a while yet, Stenwold Maker. What else? Ask.’

  ‘A man to go to the city of Tark and gather information. I can brief him in detail. I have no agents there, and now I need some eyes.’

  ‘Agreed, though you may have to pay him.’

  ‘Not a problem. In addition we’ll need supplies for our journey to Helleron, and a change of clothes for most of us wouldn’t go amiss.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Then I think we’ll be in shape to leave you.’ He looked at his hands, bunched into fists in his lap. ‘There is one more thing, though. Not something I ask of you, but something that you should know.’

  She nodded, waiting silently, and he thought she guessed already at what he would say.

  ‘The Treaty of Iron is rusting fast,’ he said. ‘The Wasps have recovered their losses from the Twelve-Year War and they are now ready to march again. I’ve seen their staging point at Asta, and I’ve read their logistics reports, and their next assault could be underway in a matter of tendays. Westwards – this time the might of the Wasp Empire will be concentrated west of here, their power brought to bear against the cities of the Lowlands.’

  ‘It would be a logical step for them,’ she agreed.

  ‘You do not need me to tell you that, when our enemy most exerts his weight elsewhere, that is the time any revolution might have the best hope of success.’

  She smiled thinly.‘I think we understand each other,’ she said. ‘My people are not ready yet to throw off the Wasps, but they will be. May that turn out to be to your people’s good, as it will be to mine. Our revolution will succeed,’ she said, and there was not the faintest smudge of doubt on her, ‘but we may need allies in the west if we’re to stay free.’

  ‘I have one thing to ask, if I may,’ said Salma. He had been fast asleep the last anyone was aware of him, and now he sat down beside them even as he spoke. Even in his prison-grimy tunic and breeches, he looked vastly more the young man they remembered. Even his smile was back.

  ‘Ask it,’ Kymene said.

  ‘There was another prisoner of the Wasps. A Butterfly-kinden named Grief in Chains?’ the Dragonfly pressed.

  ‘I know of her.’ Kymene looked at him oddly. ‘Last I heard she was some kind of pawn in their little games.’

  ‘She was passed into the hands of an officer named Aagen. Che overheard them discussing it,’ Salma said. ‘I need to know where she is. There’s one rescue left to make.’

  ‘Tynisa did better than she knew in bringing these to me,’ Stenwold remarked. He had his fellows gathered before him like a class in Collegium, even Tisamon. Only Achaeos kept himself distant, as usual. ‘Of course these are only a fragment, but I have grown used to reading fragments these last ten years.’

  ‘I thought they must be plans. Invasion plans, perhaps?’ said Tynisa. ‘I had a look at them, on the way back. I . . . didn’t understand them.’

  ‘Nothing so dramatic. Just quartermasters’ notes, logistics, accounts. The minutiae of an army’s organizing,’ Stenwold told her. When she looked crestfallen, he added, ‘But dearer than gold for all that, for they tell me where the Wasps have gone to, and in what numbers, and also with what provisions and equipment. If you know how to read them, then they’re as good as an annotated map of their progress.’

  ‘And what is the news then?’ Tisamon asked. ‘The fighters here have been saying that a lot of troops have been moving through, going west. We’ve seen some of that.’

  ‘They don’t lie.’ Stenwold nodded. ‘And neither do these reports. Remember Asta? That was just a staging ground, and now I know where they were staging for. Look here.’ He turned one of the sheets over, and took a stylus from his toolbelt, dotting on the places as he named them. ‘Myna here. Asta here. This,’ a scribbly blur, ‘is the Darakyon. Helleron here, beyond it. Here now is the Dryclaw.’ A dotted line delineated the shifting boundaries of the desert. ‘And
here . . .’ For a second he was indeed back in the classrooms of the Great College. ‘Anyone . . . ?’

  ‘Tark, sir,’ Totho said.

  ‘The Ant city-state of Tark, easternmost of the Lowlands cities. And what are the Ants of Tark best known for?’

  ‘Slaves,’ said Che distastefully.

  ‘A little simplistic,’ Stenwold said, with a scholarly wrinkle, ‘but it represents the truth that, of all the Ant city-states, Tark can consider itself rich. It stands on the Silk Road leading from the Spiderlands, on the west road used by the Scorpion-kinden of the Dryclaw into the Lowlands, on the east road for the Fly warrens of Egel and Merro. But its trade harvest is so particularly rich precisely because it is the portal to the entire Lowlands. Only not even the Tarkesh think like that. And why? Because they are more concerned with maintaining their military strength against the other Ant cities, rather than in preparing against an outside threat.’ He made an arrow with the stylus covering the march from Asta to Tark. ‘Now there is a threat. Myna has seen a vast number of soldiers already shipped to Asta, and the majority of them are headed onwards for Tark. I would guess from these figures anywhere in the region of thirty thousand: Wasp soldiers and Auxillian support totalled. Together with field weapons, war automotives, fliers, of course. It’s all in these papers, if you know how to read them.’

  ‘What can we do then?’ Che demanded, as though there could be some simple means by which to save a city.

  ‘The Ants of Tark will have to manage their own defence, not that they’d appreciate any offers of help from outsiders. The Wasps have moved ahead of us, but at least I will have eyes there to see what may be seen, and can report to me. We must go to those places in the Lowlands that will listen to us. Collegium, Sarn, even Helleron.’ The stylus tapped the map. ‘And there we have our next problem, for not all the soldiers mentioned in these reports are slated for Tark’s walls.’

  ‘Where else?’ Che looked from his face to the map and back.

  ‘Two armies, a forked attack. The bulk of the soldiers against the military might of Tark, but enough, perhaps enough, to take on Helleron. How many soldiers would it take to conquer Helleron? How many to persuade the Helleren that working with the Empire would be better than against it, or that the terms of the Treaty of Iron were now due to relax?’