Heirs of the Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Her blade whistled up towards Felipe Shah, who had not even drawn his own. The world seemed to stand still.

  Tynisa found that her own blade was already moving to intervene, but the angle was wrong to simply flick the woman’s blow aside. To beat it away from herself would only be to speed it on its way. Instead she snaked her narrow sword between Felipe and the blow and put all the strength she could into her parry, so that Elass’s sword swung round at her, narrowly missing her torn face as she fell backwards. Elass was screaming, blade raised to impale her, heedless of rank and station, and Tynisa lifted her own weapon with trembling arms, knowing she was not strong enough even to roll aside.

  The arrow struck Salme Elass in the jaw and drove in halfway to the fletchings, snapping the princess’s head sideways at an unnatural angle, a brief, bloody choking sound the only exclamation she could muster. The sword fell from her fingers, end over end, on to the snowy ground, then she collapsed.

  Dal Arche lowered his bow, his hand automatically reaching for his quiver, but finding no more arrows there. If he was satisfied that he had, at least, been permitted one last act of rebellion, his face showed none of it. Indeed there was a tense silence that overcame everyone there, each face frozen as they waited for the prince’s response. The only true mourner of Salme Elass, judging from his expression, was Felipe Shah himself.

  ‘Another dynasty ended, then,’ he murmured, so that only Tynisa could hear him. ‘Another prince to find.’

  His private thoughts seemed to exercise a magical power over the watchers for, although Felipe’s head remained bowed, all other eyes were drawn to Lowre Cean.

  ‘No, no.’ The old man shook his head. ‘Not that. Not again. Don’t ask me, Shah.’

  ‘There must be someone, or Elas Mar will become a new Rhael within a year. Find me an alternative. Give me their name, their pedigree. I must work with the tools that I have, Cean. You must rule from Leose, or what have we gained, out of all this?’

  The slump of Lowre Cean’s shoulders indicated a despondency every bit as profound as Dal Arche’s.

  ‘Gather up, all of you,’ Felipe Shah called out, his voice again reaching all ears. ‘Followers of the Salmae, know that at the end your mistress betrayed her Monarch and her prince. You serve the Lowrae now, and may that bring you more honour than your service to the Salmae.’ The words were merely formal, for Tynisa knew well that Cean was the last of the Lowre bloodline, just as Elass had been the end of hers.

  The motley collection of followers that Elass had kept with her formed an awkward group, sullen and uncertain, whilst their former enemies drifted together into a distinct band with Dal Arche – Prince Dal – at their head. Tynisa took the chance to sit up painfully, grateful when Che reached out to help her.

  ‘This is the will of the Monarch,’ Felipe Shah stated ‘declared through me, her Prince-Major. I hereby invest Lowre Cean as Prince of Leose, and Dal Arche as Prince of Rhael, and I charge them both to keep a better order in their new domains than has been the case there before now. Let us have peace and prosperity, as much as this late age allows it.’ He broke off, looking beyond the gathered groups, and Tynisa followed his gaze. Another rider was coming, and she recognized the same youth who had served Lowre Cean as messenger.

  ‘Marcade, what news?’ Lowre called out, for the young man’s expression was pale and terrible, and he gripped a scroll in a hand that shook when he proffered it to the old man.

  Lowre read the contents grimly, and passed it wordlessly to Felipe. Watching him, Tynisa saw something go out of the Prince-Major, some briefly kindled flame of hope. When at last he spoke, his gaze found hers.

  ‘My agents report . . . The Empire has brought its armies to Myna. The war has started again. They are coming for us,’ his sombre gaze passed from Tynisa to Che. ‘Or for you.’

  Epilogue

  Capitas: some months before

  Since the business with the Mosquito-kinden, the great and the good of Capitas had begun to look forward to the Empress Seda’s welcoming of new ambassadors. Whether she charmed or whether she punished them, she was equally entertaining, as good as a visit to the fighting pits. This, she knew, was how the court felt. Returned from Khanaphes and on her own throne again, she gauged the mood around her, noting with amusement the swelled numbers of courtiers eager to see her latest reception.

  But they were the Empire, or at least a certain face of it, the powerful and the ambitious whose desires she yoked to haul her Empire forward. She had divided and wooed them, played favourites, cast down, raised up, and always she had walked with the knives of the Rekef in her shadow. There was no union or alliance of them strong enough to bring her down, not for the moment.

  She was aware of how most of them looked at her. She had won them, for now. She was a woman more Wasp-kinden than her brother had ever been. She met the world head-on. She was fierce when ferocity was needed, cunning as required, and when she punished, her abrupt sentences were often carried out before the whole court, less a lesson than a spectacle. She thought that they loved her most of all for that. There was an arbitrariness to her – the one thing she shared with her late brother – that well became a master of the Empire.

  For these qualities, they forgave her a few foibles, such as the mystics and Inapt scholars she kept about the court. After all, even the Wasp-kinden had to admit that the Moths and their ilk had ruled the world centuries before, had been great powers in an age when Wasp history was not even being written down. What other great power of the modern world had seen their ambassadors come so meekly and humbly? Was there a Lowlander merchant prince or Assembler who could boast the same?

  And now she had some new visitors, and she reclined on the throne to watch as they were escorted through the great doors at the far end of the chamber.

  They were three men, all in full armour, and although they must have been aware of the unfriendly attention of the whole room, they made a brave show by marching in step, the last of them bearing a banner sloping across one shoulder: a simple checked field in familiar colours. The style of their mail was familiar to most of her court, or certainly those in active service a decade before: curved plates of chitin overlaying silk and leather and fine chainmail, in shapes elegant and graceful, and slightly too extravagant for an Imperial armourer’s more practical tastes. Where the spectators might have expected scintillating greens and blues and reds, though, all three wore identical colours, segments painted over or enamelled, and the leader’s breastplate newly wrought, so that the chitin’s sparkling finish was resplendent in their colours: black and gold.

  They had bunches of moth-antennae plumes, cloaks lined with butterfly scales, torcs of gold and mother of pearl. These Dragonfly-kinden had clearly gone to great pains to impress, unaware that in the Empire such excess would seem quaint and barbaric. As they progressed towards the throne, presenting a study in pride and defiance, they were followed by an undercurrent of derision and mockery. What did they think they were, these savages decked in the livery of Empire? Was this some kind of joke?

  ‘Speak.’ Seda’s voice rang out, halting them. ‘What do you bring before me?’

  There was a small exchange of sidelong glances between the two at the rear, but their leader knelt without hesitation. His brow gleamed a little with sweat, and Seda saw him swallow away a dry throat before he announced, ‘Your Imperial Majesty, accept me as your servant General Torste Sain, here to bring you word of the Principalities.’

  At his proclaimed rank, a tide of laughter welled up, and an eddy of angry calls for the crossed pikes, amid jeers and threats. Seda held the gaze of Torste Sain the Dragonfly general, noticing his jaw clench and his shoulders hunch, as though readying himself for the rod.

  She stood up abruptly and the room went silent, waiting for the Imperial verdict and for the downfall of these strange visitors. Instead, she turned her gaze upon her own court, and few enough of them dared meet her eyes the way the Dragonfly had.

  ‘How dare you
mock?’ she demanded, not loudly, but sharply enough to reach the back of the room. ‘What do you find here that is worthy of your humour? Is there a general of our Empire who would dare to stand thus in the heart of a foreign state, facing every expectation of a swift execution? Would any of you risk your lives in the halls of the Spider-kinden Aristoi, or the royal court of some hostile Ant city-state?’ Torste Sain was regarding her impassively, so she invited him, ‘General, speak to us of the Principalities.’

  At her words the kneeling Dragonfly stood up in a single smooth motion. ‘Great Majesty,’ he announced, ‘I am sent from the Principalities as a humble messenger. Since the borders of Empire shifted, you must know how we have been beset on all sides by the Commonweal to the west, by Myna and its allies to the east. We have had to forge ourselves a new state from the pieces that were left to us, guided by those of your people who remained and being taught the ways of Empire by your former servants. It is with joy that my people have learned the power of the new, Highness. I am proud to bear the rank of general, for I am the first of my kinden ever to do so.’ And he was indeed proud, it was plain to see. Seda wondered if any Wasp-kinden within living memory had felt that honour quite so keenly.

  ‘And do you seek to rejoin the Empire, General?’ she asked softly.

  Taking a deep breath, he braced himself. ‘Your Highness, no.’

  There might have been a uproar then, but her outstretched hands rendered it stillborn.

  The general’s two companions were standing markedly closer together now, but he himself had not moved. ‘We honour the Empire,’ he stated. ‘There is no need to take what can be freely given. We shall have tribute for your treasury, Highness. We shall have soldiers to fight alongside your armies. We ask only for recognition as your friends and protection against our mutual enemies.’

  This time she let the protests run a little longer, because there were many traditionalists still in her court, and the Empire had always recognized only two classes of geography: those parts of the map already in black and gold, and those parts yet to be painted. That mentality had served well enough to let a single hill tribe swallow up its kindred neighbours, and then put a score of other cities in chains. But the times have changed.

  ‘The word you seek is “protectorate”,’ she declared, and her court quietened quickly, because speaking over the Empress was seldom forgiven. She looked around at them all, seeing plenty there of shock and outrage, with the old guard ready to decry the insurrection of the Principalities’ Wasp-kinden, and to call for the subjugation of pretenders such as this Torste Sain. There were other expressions to be read too, though. There were thoughtful Consortium merchants, calculating tacticians, scholars of recent history and politics, Beetle-kinden diplomats and agents of the Rekef Outlander. They were thinking as she was thinking, using a logic that had nothing to do with Apt or Inapt.

  ‘Consider Collegium in the Lowlands,’ she urged her court. ‘How is it that Collegium is not beneath our flag already? Because Collegium never stands alone. When we fought Collegium, we were also fighting Tharn, the Spiderlands, the Sarnesh, Solarno and the Commonweal, not to mention the rebellions in Myna and Szar which Collegiate agents incited. That is how Collegium staved us off.’ She gifted them with a smile fierce as the sun. ‘You have all seen the statue that stands within the palace doors. Who are the defenders who stand at my back there? Soldier, artificer, merchant and diplomat. Wars are won by more weapons than swords and snapbows and artillery. General Torste, the Empire is glad to recognize its errant children, and to extend to them a hand of friendship and protection, and in return, and with our aid, you shall guard our border with the Commonweal, whose stratagems your people are best placed to understand. And when we march on the Lowlands once more, when we stand before the gates of Collegium, you shall be with us to see it, and this time we shall not turn away.’

  Capitas: Now

  There had been many changes in Capitas over the last few years. It was the Empire in miniature, and the Empire had been forced to deal with a great deal of turmoil since the strength of its armies had broken at Collegium and Sarn, Myna and Solarno and elsewhere. The ill-educated, within the Empire and without, claimed that the death of the Emperor had been the blow that rocked the Empire, but just as the death of a general would not halt an Imperial army, so the death of Alvdan II would have been nothing but a footnote in history, if only his armies and his battle plans had been sounder.

  After the end of the external war had come the internal: renegade governors refusing to acknowledge Seda, setting themselves up as their own masters. The Empire had teetered on the brink of a disintegration that would have taken it back to its feuding tribal origins of three generations before.

  That the Empire had survived to regain its territory and its strength was due to two saviours. One was embodied in Seda, her sharp mind and her adroit handling of both her allies and her enemies ensuring that she was never forced into a position from which only force could extricate her. The second saving factor was the other kinden, the Wasps’ second-class citizens.

  There had always been a fair number of Beetle- and Fly-kinden in the Empire, and they were counted Imperials of a sort, not as good as Wasps but better than the rest. While the Wasp-kinden ran their armies, the Beetles and Flies tended to find work as clerks and merchants and administrators, and when the Empire had cracked apart, they had stepped into the breach. The efficiency of the Consortium of the Honest, of the Quartermaster Corps, the Engineers, the Capitas bureaucracy, had proved the glue that held the Empire together, and that was able to re-join each piece seamlessly. No demands were made, no threats, but by the end of the insurrection there was a notable number of influential Beetles and Flies who had found promotion and power, as well as the covert gratitude of the Empress.

  But there was more than that. The doomsayers had predicted a hundred revolts, every enslaved city striving for its freedom. In truth, except for the cities of the West-Empire – Szar, Maynes and Myna in their new Alliance – the majority of the cities to rise up were those whose governors had forced the issue. The enemies of the Empress had turned out to be other ambitious Wasps rather than her subject peoples. There had been a few attempted rebellions, but most of the subject cities had otherwise simply gone about their business. In the aftermath, Seda made sure to reward both governors and slave-subjects for their loyalty, just as she had punished treachery without mercy or hesitation.

  One result of this new mood within the Empire was that Capitas’s citizens were taking a keener interest in the subjects of their Empire, which in turn had led to the founding of the Imperial Museum. It was a Collegiate concept of course, though the Lowlander Beetles preferred exhibits representing the domains of the historian, naturalist or artificer. The Imperial Museum was just that: a museum of the Empire. The building itself was still being constructed, half of its halls and wings still just foundations surmounted by the skeletons of scaffolding, but the completed sections had already seen a brisk trade of fascinated Wasp-kinden come to learn more about their slaves and servants.

  There was a Bee-kinden wing, where artefacts from the city of Vesserett were on display: their graceful yet functional carving, their elegant illustrated scrolls, all the trappings of their emergent power from the days in which they had been the nascent Empire’s first challenge. There was a hall of Grasshopper-kinden art from Sa, where slave musicians would play on certain days. There was a cellar tricked out to look like a Mole Cricket-kinden dwelling from Delve. There were three halls devoted to the Commonweal, one lined with the swords and armour of two score Dragonfly nobles, all of it recovered during the war, and many displaying the damage that had done for their original owners. The Wasp-kinden strolled through these rooms and learned a little about those far-flung cultures, those disparate peoples, but most of all they learned how they were superior because these things were all the spoils of conquest. It was the same lesson as taught by the deaths of foreign combatants in the arena, but more lasting.<
br />
  The Empress herself had made her fondness for this establishment widely known, and the Beetle-kinden Consortium family who were behind it had been richly rewarded. It was well known, indeed, that after dark, when the museum was locked up, she would use its empty halls to speak to those who had particularly attracted her notice. It was, everyone knew, a sign of great favour.

  Her companion tonight was one Major Karrec, a man of good family and good standing in the Consortium. As she paced the length of the Commonweal hall, the vacant helms of fallen nobles regarding her gravely from either side, he regaled her with stories of his war exploits and his cleverness in the face of the enemy. He was a man of middle height, running slightly to fat from a life far from rigorous, but there was a spark about him, she thought. As there should be.

  Behind the two of them, a pair of her Mantis-kinden bodyguards paced silently, the metal claws of their gauntlets folded back.

  He smiled at her, did Karrec, and walked closer than was appropriate, and she realized that he was crossing that old familiar line, as she thought he might. As the Empress, on high, she was only female in the abstract, but if she allowed her underlings any familiarity, then some of them would begin to treat her as women had always been treated in the Empire: as something to be possessed and controlled.

  As they reached the end of the hall, Karrec stopped and stared. He had been discoursing on some of the suits of mail, obviously familiar with the exhibits, but now he frowned. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, forgive me. I don’t recall a hall beyond this one.’

  ‘It is not for public viewing yet, Major,’ she said sweetly. ‘However, I have asked our curators to open it tonight, just for us.’

  He was encouraged by that, she saw, and she wondered just how deluded he might be about his prospects. Still, it was all to her advantage, so she let him dream while he could.

  The chamber beyond was small compared with the museum’s other halls, a simple box of a room that seemed as though it had been left to moulder for decades, until the walls had grown a patina of mould and lichen, the plaster decaying and falling away to turn the smooth surfaces into a maze of canyons and eroded topography, all of it made to shiver and move under the light of two ensconced torches. Karrec was not quite so oblivious as to take that sight in his stride, and he hesitated in the doorway, until she turned back and smiled at him.