Power. In a city of the Apt, the sense was weak, but someone had been eroding away at the heavy hand of disbelief that held the rest of the city in thrall. Esmail was willing to bet that there would be little of the new to be found, within those walls — no complex artifice in the lighting, no machines, no Imperial efficiency — just hall after hall devoted to the subjugated, and so many of them Inapt. The vast bulk of Capitas’s populace would be blind and deaf to it, but Esmail could almost see a brooding cloud hanging over the place. Power indeed, and of no sort that was healthy to be around.
Although, now I consider it, is any of it healthy? The Dragonfly-kinden, perhaps, but is that why their magic has atrophied so much, even by modern standards, until their great and ancient state is nothing but an eggshell ready for crushing? The Moths know: the light of the sun is for the Apt. We cannot bear its touch any more. We need doubt and fear and shadows. That is where the magic endures.
Doubt and fear and shadows practically shrouded the Imperial Museum.
Still, a summons from the Empress could not be ignored. I must trust to my skills. Beginning the long walk towards that looming edifice, he shored up the walls of his mind like a lord looking over the defences of his fortress, ensuring that the inner Esmail and the outer Ostrec were in alignment, so that everything he did, everything he thought, would he filtered only through that stolen persona.
If she suspects… But he was counting on her not being able to apply her great power with the precision that piercing his mask would require.
All too soon, the great doorway of the museum stood before him. There were no guards, which he knew must be unusual. He guessed that, for nights such as this when the Empress was in residence, the fewer witnesses the better.
He shivered, but it was Ostrec’s shiver as well. A little nervousness here would not be out of place, save only that it would not simply be acting.
He went inside.
The entrance hall was devoted to the Wasps’ own savage past, which they had contrived to make appear as ancient as the crumbling cities of the Nem. Esmail knew well that three generations back the Wasps had been living that savagery; indeed, they had barely tamed it even now, and the North-Empire still had its share of feuding hill tribes chafing at Capitas’s leash. Here were the ranked spears and tattered banners of the tribes that Seda’s grandfather had subjugated along the road to Empire. Here was the old armour, just leather and wood and chitin, but the banded construction presaging the shape of things to come. The impression was one of fecund and violent exuberance. The Wasps may have distanced themselves from that past, but they romanticized it as well. Stories set in those days of the fierce and the free were all the rage, just now.
There was no sign of Seda or any other living soul, and he passed on between the serried ranks of barbarism into the next chamber. Here, guttering lamps lit the spoils of the Twelve-year War. The walls were sheathed in screens and tapestries and woven silk depicting idylls of the Commonweal, and now the hill-tribe savagery gave way to simple tragedy: ranks and ranks of enamelled armour, the chitin and fine mail of Dragonfly princes and nobles, their bright colours muted in the dim light. Here were their incomparable bows, their narrow-headed spears, their long-hafted swords. Here — and Esmail paused, despite himself, to study it — was a map of some engagement or other, with tiny wooden soldiers standing in their battalions, demonstrating the invincibility of the Imperial war machine. A plaque explained that every single figure on both sides had been carved by Commonweal slave artisans. Esmail nodded: it fitted what he understood of the Empire and its cruel poetry. It fitted the Commonweal, too, for the slaves had plainly poured into those tiny symbols of their own defeat all the artistry and skill that they would have expended on a tribute to their own lords and ladies. For a moment he had a sudden rending sense of loss, wondering where his wife was, whether their children were safe, whether he would ever see them again.
When he looked up, she was there, the Empress Seda, flanked by two Mantis-kinden women in Imperial colours, clawed gauntlets ready to hand.
‘Ah, Estrec,’ she said, and the blood froze in his veins. She knows. She’s unmasked me already. For a moment he was in mad turmoil within his mind, and only the automatic mettle of his long training kept Ostrec’s face and form in place. He could not vouch for his expression, but Ostrec himself, discovered unexpectedly by his Empress in that place, would have lost something of his composure too.
She does not know, he insisted to himself. Seda approached him, smiling, her eyes seeming to pierce wherever they rested.
‘You must wonder why I show such interest in you, a lowly quartermaster major,’ she murmured.
She does not know. He read her expression, as much as he dared, like stealing glimpses at the sun. If she was playing a double game, he could see none of it there. Sweating despite the cool of the night, he forced himself back into his role. And Ostrec would react how…?
Ostrec would assume she had called him here because he was young and handsome and strong. The real Ostrec saw women as having a simple outlook on the world. He would look at Seda and smile, oblivious to all the occult strength that Esmail could feel radiating from her.
Esmail produced that same smile: lean, a little predatory and horribly out of place. It was the hardest thing he had done.
‘You interest me, Ostrec,’ she told him, using the right name this time, and he saw that she did not realize how she had misspoken before. It was no simple mistake, though. He was willing to bet that Seda did not make simple mistakes. To his awe and horror, he realized that some deep part of her, some subconscious monitor, really had pierced his disguise and seen him, even somehow divined his name. Give Seda another few years and she would learn to listen to that inner voice, and be even more dangerous and indomitable than she already was. For now, though, a lifetime of being deaf and blind to the magical world still chained her. For now.
And this is why the Moths sent me to kill her now.
‘I am honoured,’ he let Ostrec reply. ‘Your Majesty, tell me what I might to do please you.’ Esmail was calmer now, feeling out the limits of his situation, feeling three layers of Ostrec rub against one another inside his mind: the man’s private thoughts, the pawn in Brugan’s covert game and the public face that he was projecting to Seda.
‘I collect people who interest me,’ she told him, and abruptly turned away, not at all the reaction Ostrec had been expecting, ‘if they prove to be truly interesting, if they do not disappoint.’ She was striding off, away from the relics of the Twelve-year War, her bodyguards gliding silently along with her. Esmail started Ostrec’s feet on the same path, managing the hesitation and little stumble that he knew the man would make after being so wrong-footed.
The Empress paused a moment, gazing into a side-chamber as he caught her up. He risked a glance and saw a work in progress, statues still in open crates and great slabs of stone faced with hundreds of little sigils. Khanaphes, he realized. Of course, the Empire had added the ancient city to its holdings recently, and here were the spoils already. This museum was the Empire in miniature, a tally of its conquests.
‘What do you see?’ Seda asked him. ‘What does Khanaphes mean to you, Ostrec?’
‘Your latest triumph,’ he hazarded, but he felt the ground beneath his feet suddenly uncertain. If they do not disappoint, she had said, and he felt on the verge of disappointing her. We come back to this: Why Ostrec? What has she seen in him, to summon him here?
‘Does Khanaphes speak to you?’ she asked him. ‘What does it say?’
Again Ostrec’s glib answer welled up within him, but he fought it down, very conscious that those would be the wrong words. She collects people who interest her. What most interests the Empress of the Wasps these days?
Magic…
Esmail felt something lurch within him, his balance momentarily failing. ‘I feel power,’ he said, conscious that his chance to answer had almost passed. ‘Old power, but power nonetheless. I cannot explain it.’ It
was not what Ostrec would have said. He was improvising, because what Seda had seen within Ostrec was Esmail.
His skills hid him well. Even a skilled Skryre, if caught unawares, might not be able to penetrate his guises. Still, there was a taint about him, the inescapable bleedings of magic. Seda had looked on Ostrec and seen a dimension to him that normal Wasp-kinden lacked. He was aware that he was on very dangerous ground now. He had no idea what a woman in her position might do with the man she took him for. There must be a few Wasps around with a little of the old blood in them, from half-breedings generations back, or perhaps even survivals from ancient days when the Wasps, too, were Inapt and had some rough type of magician amongst them. From her manner he guessed now that she had gone through this charade before. What had been the outcome? Or had they all disappointed her before? Was all this just some elaborate prequel to a bloodletting?
She led him on, and they continued through all the memorabilia of the Empire’s triumphs, all the detritus of its subject races: tapestries, statues, pottery and art, and always the arms and armour of the defeated, still holed and dented and scorched where the Wasp-kinden had enforced their superiority.
When she stopped he had slowed already, because ahead he sensed what must be her destination. Again he wondered that there could be such power at all, here within the city of the Apt, but he knew it was solely through Seda’s own doing, and that she must feed it regularly. The sense of the place ahead was not strong in comparison with the sources of the Moth-kinden power he was used to, but it was flowering in such hostile soil here. Its character was disconcerting and unwholesome, a mingling of the shadow-stuff the Moths liked with something even darker. He thought he could scent the faint copper smell of blood upon the air.
Seeing him react, Seda smiled. ‘And they said you were cocky,’ she murmured.
He had a stab of panic, thinking that he had dropped his mask somehow, but he saw that his hesitation and solemnity here were exactly what she would expect of Ostrec — if Ostrec had been what she took him for. In responding as he was, he was confirming himself as an object of interest rather than a disappointment.
She turned, and stepped into the next hall, past a curtain that one of her guard had drawn aside. For a moment his instincts warred within him: he knew he must not step within, and yet he knew that it was death to turn aside now, a more certain death but perhaps a cleaner one.
But he wanted to know. He wanted to see. He stepped inside.
The walls of the small, windowless chamber had been covered with dead vines and branches, nailed up everywhere to form an ersatz grove, a cage of withered wood. A few dim lanterns hidden amongst the twisted, interlacing boughs provided the only light Seda allowed within.
No arms and armour here, no exhibits, nothing for public edification. Instead there was only one piece of history in the room, and it was not the Empire’s. Eight feet tall and formed of rotting, insect-infested wood, it was an effigy, a crude mantis shape: a single warped upright reaching almost to the ceiling, with two crooked arms. Esmail knew the pattern well. Wherever the Mantis-kinden made their homes, somewhere, in the darkest inner glade furthest from foreign eyes, there would be some nasty piece of work like this. Where Seda might have acquired such a ritual figure, he did not know, but he knew that the ancient Mantis traditions fed them with death and blood, and those traditions had not been overly encouraged by that race’s Moth masters. It would seem that Seda had resurrected the practice, and from that he guessed that she had probably secured the loyalty of her bodyguards until death and perhaps beyond.
Then there was movement all around. The criss-crossing of the branches, the overwhelming presence of the idol, had blinded him to the fact that the room was already occupied.
Conspirators, he thought immediately, contrasting them with Brugan’s fellow plotters, but he knew in a moment there was a better word. There were four of them here, all Wasp-kinden men and nothing special — none of them looked like high-ranking officers, although perhaps not simple soldiers either. He mentally labelled them — slaver, two sergeants and a Consortium clerk — without much justification.
They were waiting for him to step deeper into the room, which would leave the Empress and her guards in the doorway, barring his retreat. It seemed to him, though, that he had already taken too many steps just by coming here. A few more would make no difference.
He went in.
‘Ostrec, what has your life been to date?’ the Empress’s soft voice asked him, from over his shoulder. ‘Have you found the world empty, unfulfilling. Have you drunk your fill of rank and ambition, and yet remained thirsty? Have you always known that there was more to life, lurking at the edge of vision, in the shadows, on the far side of the mirror?’
And the answer was ‘no’, of course, as far as the real Ostrec’s memories went, but if he had possessed some atavistic spark of the old ways, then no doubt all that would have been true. Esmail studied the men around him, and in those Wasps, yes, perhaps there was some taint, some residual sense of discontinuity that hinted at an unsettled heritage. It was pitifully little, but then the Wasps had been an Apt kinden for generation on generation, so it was surprising that even these dregs were left.
He realized that he had nodded, at Seda’s words, and there was a scuffle from behind him. He turned quickly, stepping away from the doorway, ending up almost shoulder to shoulder with the slaver. A newcomer had arrived, but not willingly, for two of the Mantis-kinden were manhandling him, his arms bound behind his back. He was a middle-aged Wasp, and Esmail picked out his face from Ostrec’s memories, identifying him as a Consortium man in Brugan’s pay, just a little cog in the Rekef general’s army of informants.
‘Ostrec!’ the man shouted. ‘Help me!’
Esmail glanced at the Empress, whom he realized was observing him closely.
‘I will open the doors of your world.’ Her voice was gentle, yet the shouting of the bound man could not eclipse it. ‘Only follow your instincts, and I will show you what the absence is that has gnawed at your life. I will fill you.’
Could I have killed her in the museum before? He wondered if she had given him the chance to fulfil his mission as they passed through the galleries: to cut her down and then flee her guards, all the way back to the phalanstery near Tharn. I could even strike now. A moment is all I need, and they are not ready for it. I would die, but perhaps the death of the Empress is worth one killer’s blood.
But they were empty thoughts, because she had already reached him in the way that she intended. Esmail the spy was as caught up in her as she had meant Ostrec to be, for different reasons. What could she not do, this woman? A Magician-Empress seeking to transform the world.
The bound man had been forced to his knees in the very shadow of the Mantis icon, and it required no special intuition to see what must now be done. Esmail extended a hand, just as a Wasp should, reaching for Ostrec’s Art. To mimic Art was hard, a real test of a spy’s skill, and he would not have wanted to try this against a moving target, but the Mantis-kinden were holding their victim very still, with so little apparent effort.
At the last moment he stopped himself, knowing it was wrong. Not mercy, not morality, but wrong by the rules that Seda was playing with. No cauterizing fire here. She wanted blood.
When he held his hand out for the knife, he sensed a change in them all, a measure of acceptance not present a moment before. Only then did he realize that he had passed a test — one he had been on the very brink of failing merely by playing his stolen role too well.
The eyes of his victim beseeched him, and he watched the man’s mouth open and shut, calling his borrowed name. One of the Mantids dragged back on the prisoner’s head by the hair, baring his throat for Esmail’s blade.
A moment’s hesitation would pass muster, for Ostrec the quartermaster was not a habitual killer, and Ostrec the Rekef man was still supposed to be a secret. In himself, Esmail found he cared little enough about one more dead Wasp, but a sacrifice in th
is place, in this company, would unleash a power that he had no say over. He would be doing her will, feeding her fire.
He made it quick, professional — and to the pits with what Ostrec would have done. One of the Mantids caught the first of the blood in a chalice as it spilled. The rest was allowed to run over the floor. He could not help but notice that the stone seemed to suck it up, unnatural and greedy. The reek of blood in the air was sharp as spices, and he felt dizzy and nauseous with it. He could feel the rotten wood of the idol sating its thirst.
The chalice was pressed into his hands, and he now understood. He was a spy, not some great magician. His talents were great within his own narrow field, but this was beyond him. He had not seen the trap until its jaws began closing on him.
‘Drink, and be one of my chosen,’ Seda told him. ‘Cast off all other loyalties; be bound to me, and become greater than you were. Drink.’
And they were not empty words. Symbols had power. As a man talented in all manner of evasion and misdirection, he might be able to sidestep the worst, but there would be hooks in him, once he drank. What he yielded to the Empress here could never be fully regained. She would have a hold on him. In some sense, no matter the distance, no matter how he twisted and turned, he would remain hers.
He could refuse, and they would ensure that his blood would be the next offered to the idol. Would such a death be preferably to a life ensnared by this hybrid blood-and-shadow magic that the Empress was building?
But something twisted in him: Did we not want this? Would the Moths not do this if they could? This is power! Here in the heart of Capitas, in the Empire of the Apt, this is power. If there was ever to be some rebirth of the old days, how else but this way? He looked at the Empress, and saw that she was young and beautiful and strong and bold. Why not her? Where are my loyalties now?
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