‘Excuse me, sir, but he’s… I don’t think he wants to come in, sir.’
‘But he has papers.’
‘The seal of the Empress, sir,’ the sergeant said, plainly awed by the thought.
Roder stood sharply. ‘Show me,’ he ordered.
The visitor stood on one of their embankments, looking out at the ruin of the Folly, and Roder’s pace slowed as he appreciated just what the wind had blown into his camp. Not a Rekef man, not some Consortium profiteer or Slave Corps major, not a Wasp at all. In all his years of soldiering, he was willing to bet that a figure like this had not graced an Imperial camp, or at least not with official papers.
A man, he could tell, tall and slender, but the rest was just armour — and what armour! Roder knew a little of the collector’s trade, and what he was looking on would have driven a half-dozen rich men back in the capital mad with greed. A full set of sentinel plate, enamelled black and gold, but not Imperial craftsmanship. The ancient Inapt smith who had wrought this had worked to an alien aesthetic, crafting something elegant and spined and deadly, producing a carapace more than a suit of armour.
There was a clawed gauntlet on the newcomer’s hand, its narrow blade folded back along his arm, where the armour was slit so as to allow the barbs of his Art to jut out. As Roder approached more and more cautiously, fearing some lethal trap set by the Etheryen Mantids, the figure’s free arm thrust towards him, with crumpled papers proffered in its gauntleted fingers.
Roder had no intention of getting that close, but the sergeant pattered ahead of him and retrieved the documents, handling them as though they were gold dust. Roder glanced down at the seals, and then again. The Empress’s highest recommendations, he thought. Her own personal seal. Nobody so important as to merit all of this would risk themselves by coming out to visit an army in the field. Until now.
One of the Empress’s bodyguard, he realized, for he had seen that band of Mantis-kinden at the palace, but were they not all women?
‘I give you welcome to the camp of the Eighth Army,’ Roder said carefully, watching for the slightest suggestion that this figure was about to turn on him. ‘Can I ask your purpose here?’ The so-impressive credentials gave no hint of it, simply expressed the Empress’s utmost trust and faith in the bearer, who was identified only by the armour he wore. Could be just about anyone in there…
The armoured Mantis raised an arm and unhinged the metal claw, letting it flick out to point towards the shattered shell of Malkan’s Folly.
‘You’ve come to see the result of the battle for the Empress?’ Roder hazarded.
For a moment the helm turned towards him. In the failing light there was the suggestion of a ghostly pale face beneath the raised visor, and the man’s stare had a cold force that sent Roder back a step.
Then the Mantis was striding forwards, towards the edge of the camp and then beyond it, heading for the fallen fortress, and for its hidden defenders waiting in the darkness below.
That night, some of the sentries reported hearing screams.
Twenty-Two
‘She certainly makes a good show,’ Colonel Harvang commented. For once he was not eating, although his fleshy lips twitched and moved when he was not speaking, as though still savouring something.
The senior members of General Brugan’s conspiracy were meeting in the palace itself, a room buried deep in the cellars, one of a complex of chambers that the Rekef traditionally used for storing useful prisoners and parting them from their secrets with the aid of machinery. It said a great deal about the Empire that such concerns were already in the architects’ minds when the edifice was first planned.
General Brugan grunted. He had been with the Empress last night, during another of her debauches. He felt physically drained now, as he always did, and the blood that so obviously fed her seemed only to leach something vital from himself. He had tried, so very hard, to see it all as just the ruler of the Wasps exalting in her power, but he knew that it was more, and that he would never understand.
He shuddered, visibly enough that Harvang raised an eyebrow.
‘These tapes…’ Colonel Vecter was poring over his reports, and had not noticed. ‘These cloth things the halfbreed makes…’ If a machine was not intended for excruciation, he had little time for it. ‘They take her voice all over the Empire, inspirational messages to the troops. I have good reports — morale and fighting spirit all kept high. The personal touch.’ He tutted. ‘General, I was unsure why you were so insistent on keeping her, rather than simply replacing her, but I think I understand. It is a bitter thought but the Empire does need her.’
Brugan stared at him. Oh, you do not understand. The intrinsic division within him warred constantly. He hated Seda, he feared her: she was unnatural, terrifying, something from the old stories. Yet he could not live without her. The best compromise he could make was to possess her, control her. He could diminish her into a proper example of Wasp-kinden womanhood, and so regain some vestige of control over himself.
They had not brought many of their confederates here; this was Rekef territory after all, and outsiders were seldom welcome. Only Harvang’s man, Ostrec, was here to listen in, and that only because the conversation would eventually turn to his orders.
‘We have our people mostly in place,’ Vecter continued. ‘The palace is under our control, and we have Colonel Sherten in the city garrison. There’s Major Hasp of the Slavers, and Knowles in the Consortium. No serious inroads into the Engineers, but then they’re not a political force yet.’ He looked up brightly. ‘Time to sound the advance?’
‘We still haven’t touched her,’ Brugan said. The others looked at him blankly, but he knew he was right. Seda seemed to move in another world, a different medium. She had her dubious advisers: the old Woodlouse, passing Moth ambassadors, odd slaves and servants who came and went and disappeared, so that even the Rekef could not keep track of them. The conspirators could control all the soldiers they wanted, but they would not even approach Seda’s secret world.
He could not explain this to them. He could barely explain it to himself. He knew, though, that if he was to triumph over her, if he was to become Seda’s master, then he must strip her of that orbit of counsellors, those frauds and shysters who whispered mysticism into her ears.
‘Ostrec,’ he growled, and the major started in surprise. ‘Your work.’
‘I have been in her presence two or three times, sir,’ Ostrec reported. ‘I have seen her notice me, perhaps more than notice, but.. nothing more. I have felt myself on the point of some breakthrough for a tenday or more.’
‘Your breakthrough has come,’ Brugan told him flatly. ‘She has sent for you.’
This was news to everyone and that in itself was a sour point. Ostrec was ostensibly from the Quartermaster Corps, but Seda had given the command to Brugan himself. So does she know he’s Rekef, or not? And such an offhanded command it had been. ‘She said she wants to see more of you. At night.’ The words were painful to spit out, and his manner was putting the two colonels on edge. ‘The museum, you know it?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve not visited but I know where it is.’
‘You’ll go?’
Ostrec frowned, the perfect picture of a dutiful Wasp. ‘If you so order it, of course, sir.’
Harvang made a noise, more of hoarse breathing than anything else, but enough to draw their attention. ‘Sometimes men go to visit the Empress there and never leave. Just as sometimes slaves — or those of a higher station — are summoned to her at the palace and likewise are not seen again.’
‘The servants…?’ Ostrec ventured.
‘Oh someone must be doing it — taking away the bodies, cleaning up the mess, after whatever it is that actually goes on,’ Harvang said heavily, and his glance towards the general was keen: I know that you know more than you let on. ‘There seems to be a hidden cadre within the palace, and we have not been able to infiltrate it — we cannot even see what to infiltrate. Is it just those curse
d Mantis bodyguards doing all the work? Who else does she use? She’s called you, my boy, and either you’ll die of it or you’ll find out something useful. You understand?’
‘I believe I do, sir,’ Ostrec replied calmly.
He was a handsome young man, Brugan thought sourly. Was the Empress motivated by something so commonplace? He thought not, but he could never be certain. I hope he dies.
‘I feel,’ said Seda, ‘like a child who has only just learned to read — so very late! — and now they tell me all the libraries burned down before I was born.’
The book beneath her hands was ancient, pages of cracked and tattered vellum on which the faded ink was barely legible, scuffed and rubbed away, and in places there were the tracks of beetle larvae and the blackened edges of old burns. Of the original text perhaps only half remained intact.
‘I have come into my inheritance. I have gone to the ancient wardens of the beginning times and exacted tribute from them. I stride into the sunlight to enter into my kingdom and… dust and ashes. Where has it gone? ’
‘Five hundred, hm, years, your Imperial Majesty,’ came the soft, careful voice of old Gjegevey. Pale in the lamplight, the gaunt and hunchbacked Woodlouse-kinden loomed behind her. Grey-skinned and tall, at least a hundred of the years he spoke of weighed on his shoulders, but his were a long-lived kinden. And even he could not remember the real days of magic that had passed away so long ago, and so completely.
The shutters were drawn, and Seda had ordered servants to nail blankets up across them, sealing out the sun. The fragile Moth-kinden text that she was trying to piece her way through seemed merely blank in daylight. Only guttering flames would reveal the faint scratching of its secrets.
‘The Moths themselves,’ Seda murmured, ‘they come to my court from Tharn, and think to teach me. I would learn, truly I would, but either they are too close-handed with what they know or… Gjegevey, they speak mostly politics, no different to any ambassador or courtier. What of their great plans for the world?’
‘They are what the times, ah, have made of them,’ he ventured. ‘And their great magics perhaps come at too great a price, hm? Majesty, you have no doubt heard the same, hrm, rumours from Tharn as I. The magic they raised to, ah, evict your brother’s troops, it has, hm, left a stain. Deaths, madness… I gain the impression that many of their Skryres did not, hm, survive the experience. And this was the greatest magic our times have seen, undertaken by some of its, hem, most skilled practitioners.’
‘So I should think smaller?’ she snapped over her shoulder, scathingly. ‘I should content myself with their scraps?’
‘If that were my, hm, advice, would you follow it, Majesty?’
The look she gave him was answer enough. ‘It cannot all be gone.’ The book was a history, but the ancient histories of the Inapt made for tortuous reading for one brought up only on lists of battles and generals. Everything was allusion and metaphor, or perhaps it was not metaphor but myth. Or perhaps the myths were being set down as absolute truth. Nothing was plain, or else everything was plain and nothing was believable. ‘Were the times so very different back then? Monsters and fires from the sky, and conjuring the bones of the earth? What happened to it all?’
‘Theories differ.’ When Gjegevey spoke, his voice held more sadness than usual, a reverent and wistful tone. ‘My people, hm, these days we mostly believe that it is simply that magic’s time has waned, and is still waning, as the turn of the moon leads to darker nights, so some great and, hem, invisible wheel has taken us away from those days when a magician might, ah, hold the world in the palm of his hand. Some day it is to be hoped the, eh, wheel may turn all the way, and magic shall wax once more. For now, though, we are left with only shallows where once the sea rolled.’
‘Poetic, but a mixed metaphor,’ Seda grumbled. With nobody else was she so informal as with Gjegevey. He had been one of her earliest supporters but, more than that, he had been someone who had been willing to associate with her back before her brother’s death, when the executioner’s shadow hung constantly over her. She was fonder of him than she would admit. ‘So tell me some other theory… no, I know it. The Apt.’
‘The Moth-kinden favour it.’
‘The Apt came with their revolutions,’ Seda murmured. ‘Uprisings in Pathis, in Myna. But it must be more than that. The Masters had already sealed themselves away in Khanaphes long before, and there was never a Commonweal revolution. The Spiders still hold their lands in thrall, but mostly without magic. Perhaps the Apt could take control of their own destiny because magic was not what it had once been, even then. And now…’ She hissed through her teeth. ‘But there are places where it has clung on, Gjegevey. We know there are. The power of the Darakyon touched me. It set me on this path, but it’s gone now, nothing but a stand of twisted trees. I refuse to believe that there is nowhere else.’
‘The Darakyon was an evil place, Majesty,’ Gjegevey whispered.
She gave him a level look. ‘Evil is a word for those we wish our histories to damn. And, besides, where are all the magical places of sweetness and light, old man? Gone, if they were ever there. It would seem that which you term evil has at least one virtue: it abides.’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘I have lived most of my life in fear. You know that. Now there is some small chance this unlooked for gift will give me control of my own destiny. What is morality against that?’
‘And the destiny of the Empire?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Or just your own?’
‘Do you honestly think they are not one and the same? Any other theories, old man?’
She did not expect any, so he surprised her by saying, ‘Just the one: that the Inapt, ah, destroyed themselves.’
She stared down at the page before her, with its dense recitals. ‘There are a lot of wars in these old histories,’ she allowed. ‘Or I thought perhaps they were not wars but some other meaning dressed up as war.’
‘There were a great many wars,’ Gjegevey confirmed, ‘but they were wars of a scale and a style that your kinden might not have recognized them as such. Conflicts lasting decades, centuries even. If artifice sends your wars on swift wasps’ wings, think of the old days as snails’ wars, slow grappling, histories of skirmishes and shifts, no less fierce but utterly alien. One could have lived all one’s life within such a war and not known it.’
‘Wars for what?’
‘For control. In the grand old days of magic, the elite few who understood it all fought wars to control the future, warring ideologies that spawned earthly battlefields. The Moths, they were the greatest, in the end, which is why it is their histories that you read now. By their own claims, they saved the world from a multitude of evils, so, perhaps they used up their magic, weakened themselves so greatly that their slaves could cast them off. But you know all this.’
‘I am not sure what I know,’ she replied, but his words crystallized a certainty within her. ‘Their great wars… the Coup of the Assassins, the Purge of the Mosquito-kinden.’
‘We record them as true.’ Gjegevey ventured a smile. ‘Of course we record many, hm, fantastical things as true, but those conflicts were real. There is evidence.’
She remained silent a long time, after that, where he had expected her either to press for more details or to pass on to some other subject. She was not reading, either. The book beneath her hands passed unnoticed.
At last she said, ‘Gjegevey… there were other conflicts.’
‘Many,’ he agreed, ‘and in all, ehm, probability many that even my people did not record. The past is a deep well, and in those days there were ways to drive an enemy to the very edge of oblivion, even..’ He stuttered to a halt, for she was staring at him intently.
‘Yes…?’ she prompted.
He shrugged as if to suggest he had been merely rambling, that she should pay no heed.
Without looking, her quick hands turned pages until she was near the end of the book’s legible section. The pages there were water-marked, worm-eaten and frayed. �
��What is this, then? For, of all things in this overwritten textbook, this has no legend, no explanation. Just one symbol on a page, and yet I feel…’
She stopped, for Gjegevey had drawn away. His face was always pale, and now discoloured by the lamplight, but she would swear that he had become even more ashen, and something leapt within her breast.
‘The Seal of the Worm,’ he whispered on the edge of hearing, as though against his will. She sensed him struggling with himself, read his mind, almost, seeing him weighing whether he could convince her that it was nothing, just some scholar’s idle sketch.
‘Yes,’ he admitted at last, reluctantly, ‘you have found the edges of a hole that the Moths have eaten through history in order to erase an ancient foe. But, Majesty, hear me. If you ever valued my counsel, if you ever thought me wise, look no further in that direction, I beg you.’ His voice had changed, lost its vague mannerisms, become like a sword. She actually drew back from him, from this new, changed creature.
On the page before her, the symbol, a crooked spiral hatched with a hundred tiny lines, seemed to writhe.
‘I shall consider the matter,’ she said, and knew it to be at least a partial acquiescence. She closed the book. She had read enough for one day.
Esmail planned his route carefully so that he had some distance between himself and the Imperial Museum, when he first came in sight of it, viewing it down a long gas-lit avenue lined with grand buildings, factora and offices of the various divisions of the Wasp administration. The museum itself was almost finished, its shape an awkward compromise between aesthetic and functional. The usual ziggurat shape the Wasps preferred — stone copies of the hill forts their ancestors had lived in — had been expanded outward in wings, to allow sufficient space within for all the anticipated exhibits.
A shadow fell on his heart as he saw it. That was the only way he could describe the sensation to himself. He had not seen the building before, his path had not brought him here, but not until now did he realize that some part of him had been avoiding it.
The Air War sota-8 Page 33