Heirs of the Blade sota-7

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  But I know more than you ever did, Seda reflected, because castigating her dead brother was another source of amusement to her. She was slowly mastering her newfound skills, but the ability to read others and to know of danger, and to turn minds, all these were increasingly within her grasp. Last year an assassin had broken into her very bedchamber. She had talked to him all through the night, and when the guards eventually found him, he was ready to swear undying allegiance to the throne.

  She had ordered the intruder skinned alive.

  Her shadows moved with her, her constant guards. They were gifts from the Moth-kinden of Tharn, and she knew that her regular soldiers worried about exactly where their loyalties lay. Only Seda could see their hearts, however, and she had twisted them, and twisted them again, by gifts and words, promises and understandings, until the half-dozen Mantis-kinden killers were hers through and through, pledged inviolably to her by their ancient knots of honour. They carried bows and the short-bladed clawed glove that only the Mantids cared for, and any assassins that wished to try their luck would find the Empress’s bodyguards waiting.

  She heard the shuffle of feet behind her, and sensed her Mantis-kinden escort tense for a moment. There were few allowed in her chambers unbidden, though, and once they recognized the Woodlouse-kinden, Gjegevey, they relaxed again. The old slave was her favourite adviser, and a supporter of hers since before the Emperor’s death; and if she had learned one lesson from her brother’s failures it was to reward loyal service. More than that, though, Gjegevey understood what she was, what she had become, and what she wanted.

  ‘I, ahm, understand all is in readiness.’ To the Wasps he was a bizarre spectacle, outlandishly tall and thin, yet so crook-backed that it seemed that he was meant to be taller still. His skin was a pallid greyish-white, with darker bands starting at his forehead and patterning the top of his bald head before disappearing down beneath his robes behind. He claimed to be older than the Empire itself, but his eyes were sharp in their nest of wrinkles. His people dwelt north and east of Wasp lands, she understood, in some steaming swamp-forest of eternally rotting trees, and his kinden were seldom seen. Once, he had been an agent for whatever nebulous leadership existed amongst his scholarly and retiring fellows, but time had eroded the particulars of his original briefing, so now he was hers entirely.

  ‘Khanaphes,’ she pronounced it carefully, ‘is known to your people, I am sure, in far greater detail than you have described it.’

  ‘Memory fails me…’ he said vaguely. ‘But perhaps the sight of it will stir some, ah, recollection in me. Without much, hmn, hope, it behoves me to sound my old note of caution once again, Majesty. There are other ways.’

  ‘We will exhaust them all in time, but why cast away this opportunity? The Empire has come to Khanaphes,’ she told him. ‘My artificers and officers tell me of diverse reasons why we must make the city ours. My soldiers walk its streets even now. You know what I must have, Gjegevey.’

  He nodded unhappily, but she knew he would come with her and aid her, if only to retain some hope of influencing the future, of affecting what she might become.

  ‘Gjegevey, you shepherded me into this world, as much as ever Uctebri did. You opened my eyes to the old magics. You prepared the way that made me this… thing. ’ She saw the pain in his eyes, saw him about to remonstrate with her, but she pressed on. ‘What am I, slave? The ritual that killed my brother stripped me of my birthright, and gave me only rags to hide myself with. Am I to be content in that? The Mosquitos spoke truth in one thing: at the moment I am a beggar at the Moths’ table for what little they deign to share. I have been reborn into a new world, an ancient and terrible world. I therefore see all the things my people are blind to. Am I to be a slave in this new world and only play the empress, as Uctebri designed? Or am I to seize that world with both hands and sting it into submission? You know this, old slave.’

  ‘But Khanaphes…’ he whispered. ‘They are, hmm, ancient there, or were… perhaps the power is fled from that place, or perhaps. .. perhaps it remains too strong even now…’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ she told him drily. ‘If they are strong, then I shall be bold and conquer their strength. If they are dead, I will turn over their tombs for what fragments they have left.’ Her face hardened. ‘But I know they are not dead.’

  That was news to the old man. ‘Majesty…’

  ‘I dream, Gjegevey, I dream of lightless halls, of statues that wake and walk. Each night another page to the story. My dreams whisper the name “Khanaphes” to me, over and over. I am called there, as power calls to power. They made themselves the heart of the world in an age lost to my people, an age dim even to the Moths.’ She smiled. ‘And to your own folk, and their rotting libraries?’

  ‘We… remember,’ he said softly. There was once a time when Moths and Spiders called us brothers, mm? But never did the Masters of Khanaphes. My folk turned away from the world long before the, ah, Moths lost their domain to their slaves, and yet even at our greatest height, so the influence of, hmn, Khanaphes was already in decline. Its greatest golden days were behind it, even then. Old, Your Majesty. Old so that you, or even I, can barely, ah, comprehend. All that is left is the worn stub of what once was.’

  ‘I will be Empress,’ she told him flatly. ‘Empress of both worlds. The one I shall move with armies and machines, the other…’ She turned from the balcony at last, stepping back into shadow. ‘Do you not wish to walk the secret halls of Khanaphes, Gjegevey?’

  His long face always provided a burlesque of melancholy, like a fantastical actor’s mask. ‘I fear I do not, hm, Majesty. But if you walk them, I shall be there beside you.’

  Eight

  The Wasp-kinden were a young race, but they had developed their own art forms nonetheless. Spider-kinden merchants making the long trek to Capitas were favourably impressed by the degree to which they had advanced the art of the pit-fight. Scorpion chieftains arriving with their strings of human goods admired the Wasps’ ability to control and manage so many slaves. Many foreigners of all kinden were struck by the delicacy and care with which the Wasps ordered and categorized their prisoners, although their unfavourable critiques were usually coloured by their own position on the wrong side of the bars.

  There were professionals, former Consortium clerks or retired Slave-Corps officers, whose sole business was to find prisoners a fitting place of durance – either until their eventual fate was decided or enacted, or because that imprisonment represented that fate. Cells, mines, shackles, the quick mercy of the blood-fights – or as one of a small but mysterious number who were sent to the palace and simply… disappeared.

  Many prisoners laboured, too. Often this was not even as a result of a sentence, just a good use of resources that would otherwise be sitting idle while being fed for free. There were the parched-dry quarries of Shalk, the winding mines of the Delves, logging camps, fields, masons’ yards, each penitent fitted to his interim fate with a master’s expertise as delicate as that of a matchmaker.

  Then there were the factories, which were always hungry but seldom fed with the bodies of prisoners. Most of the workers were slaves or citizens, and all of them were not just Apt, but artificers of some mean grade or other. The vast machine-noisy halls were operated day and night, and if it was possible they were run even while errant machines were being fixed. Fingers and toes were a cheap currency in those chattering, clattering rooms, but it was better work than the mines, less dangerous than the army. The free workers there held themselves to be a curious aristocracy, standing together against the bureaucrats, the taskmasters, and the grafters of the Empire. They might only be churning out standard-issue breeches by the hundred, but where, as they pointed out, would an army be without its trousers?

  Sometimes an artificer fell from grace, and then the factories were always waiting. Even murderers, even traitors, if they had a spark of mechanical skill, would be chained to the machines and put to work while waiting for sentence.
A little knowledge was too precious to waste.

  Angved hated it. It was fair to say that he was being unreasonable, given all the other ways a prisoner could be spending his time, but even so… He had been a lieutenant in the Engineering Corps – an officer! – and now a burly slaver came each morning to chain him up in front of all these others, as even the slaves were not chained, and he worked at the most menial, repetitive tasks, and risked his hide between the teeth of the looms if they jammed, and he had to bear the mockery of the rest of the workforce, because he had been better than them, and had failed.

  He had never been a high-flier. Past forty now, his hair greying, and when he was young he had thought he would be a major by this age, perhaps with some comfortable teaching post. Then there had been a string of poor decisions, the wrong horses backed, unavoidable failures that had drawn the ire of his superiors. He had never made captain, whilst the declining quality of his assignments had eventually ensured that he never would. Then had come the bastard Rekef with their make-or-break plan for Khanaphes, and he had seen it as a desperate chance to regain his place on the ladder, for all that it would probably have ended with a knife in his back had all gone according to plan.

  All had most definitely not gone according to plan.

  With the exception of two old women who ran the kitchen, the other factory hands were not Wasps. They had a curious two-tier organization, two separate tribes side by side yet passing through one another as though existing in fractionally shifted worlds. The Beetle-kinden, and the bulk of the slaves – Ants, Bees, even some halfbreeds who were inexplicably not despised by their comrades as Angved would have anticipated – worked at one level of detail, whilst a host of Fly-kinden men and women were busy in amongst them, passing under and over and sometimes even through the machines, trusting to their small size, delicate fingers and quick reflexes to preserve them from injury. The only fifth wheel in the factory was Angved himself, the size of a normal kinden – by his standards – and yet put to the most menial jobs during both shifts, by specific decree.

  For a man formerly of the Engineers, it was pure gall, insulting, demoralizing, as good as receiving a beating any day. It showed that the clerks who had assigned him here knew their business.

  He had made his pleas. He had shown them his findings. Still, they had been dead set on his excruciation and then a public execution, on general principle. Then it had all been dropped. There had been one night when he was dragged before a triumvirate of hooded men – Rekef for sure – and they talked amongst themselves about him, and he understood that the Khanaphes expedition was now an embarrassment best removed from history entirely, and him along with it.

  But he had lived on for another night, in fear, and then another, and then a quiet, lean man had come and explained to him how he had best forget the name of that desert city, unless someone should mention it to him first.

  A tenday later, and the factory had got him. Since then he had been here, the butt of every joke, hearing the snickering of slaves, the laughter of women – Fly-kinden women no less – wasting his training in the manufacturing of the banal and the commonplace. Only one thought kept him sane, for, while he would not converse with his fellows there, he overheard their copious gossip. As he eked his days out amongst the menials of the machine world, one fact went round and round in his head.

  They’ve gone to Khanaphes.

  The Empire had taken Khanaphes as easily as he had known it must, having seen the city’s primitive defences first hand. But why would the Empress stretch her reach so far, and for so little gain, unless. ..

  After he had returned from there, he had cast his die. He had given his report, his numbers, the results of his tests. He had supposed them since burned, lost, misfiled, sitting in an unread stack of trivia on some uneducated Rekef thug’s desk. But what if an artificer had got hold of them, after all? What if something Angved had said had penetrated as far as the Engineering Corps?

  They’ve gone to Khanaphes.

  Of all the world, he had no wish to return to that cursed city, but nowhere else would rescue him from this humiliating penance, and he still had enough frustrated ambition to overcome his fears and his memories.

  They’ve gone to Khanaphes.

  It became his mantra, his hope. And one day, after tendays and tendays of wretched picking at the factory machines, they came for him as well.

  They came halfway through the working day: serious, solid men in uniform, who muscled into the factory without a word and struck his chains off in a manner that made it clear that being shackled to an automated loom would be luxury compared to where he was going next. The rest of the workforce had gone quiet and diligent immediately, their chatter and gossip killed in an instant.

  When they hauled him out of that place, he had assumed it would be to the interrogation table for sure, since their grim manner suggested nothing else. They always claimed that doctors and artificers broke first, for every junior machine-hand ended up running the tables for the Rekef questioners once or twice, and, after that, little imagination was needed to proceed through all the ways a body could be broken beyond any engineer’s repair.

  They hustled him across the city until he recognized the district. It was a home away from home for him, the workshops and familiar halls of the Engineering Corps in the little quarter of the city they had made their own. It did not look so welcoming now, for nobody met his eyes. Nobody would admit to knowing this old washed-out former lieutenant who had somehow managed to bring so much wrath down upon his own shoulders.

  A moment later and he was inside the Severn Hill, a squat ziggurat named after the Corps’ first colonel. Rather than the well-lit debating rooms and the grand hall, however, he was hauled downstairs, away from the sun, into the tunnels beneath.

  A tribunal, he realized. He was not sure, just then, if he might not have preferred the Rekef and its interrogation tables. Every engineer knew of the tribunals, although nobody ever formally spread the information. They were not admitted to by the Corps, internally or externally, but apprentice artificers whispered the rumours one to another. They were the Corps’ own internal disciplinaries, for engineers who had betrayed the Corps to some other branch of the services. All nonsense, of course, for any such rivalry between the different wings of the army’s support corps would be damaging to the Empire, and thus never tolerated. And yet it was true, and it happened, and the Engineers looked after their own no less than did the Rekef or the Slave Corps or the Consortium. They were a young elite, the artificers of the Empire, and ruthless in keeping their secrets.

  He found himself, at last, in an eight-sided chamber that he guessed must lie beneath the very centre of Severn Hill. The ceiling was a casual marvel, a piece of mechanical elegance that he realized must only ever be seen by the condemned and their judges. From a mosaic setting of geometric patterns set out in thumbnail-sized blue and green tiles depended a veritable orrery of lamps, circling one another in complex, perfect patterns to the gentle ticking of its clockwork. From a professional point of view it was admirable, but it peopled the scene below it with disturbing, circling shadows, and the blue-green of the ceiling reflected a gloomy, undersea radiance on to everything there.

  There was a high dais to one side of the room, a long table set out upon it which was scattered with scrolls and papers, and at least one map that looked – from the brief glimpse Angved caught of it – to be a chart of the Lowlands. Angved himself was not destined for that table, of course. There were three rows of benches on the far side of the room, and they dumped him on one without a word and left him there, abruptly forgotten and abandoned.

  Surreptitiously, he peered at the high table, trying to work out what was going on. There were a half-dozen men there, conferring in hushed voices but with a fair amount of animation, showing that, whatever was at stake, they had a great deal invested in it. Another man sat back, listening but not contributing, and displaying an indefinable air of wrongness. Not one of us, Angved rea
lized, although he was not sure if he himself still counted as one of the Corps. The seated man was Rekef, though: he’d bet his life on it. An observer from the secret service – Outlander probably – brought to the secret heart of the Engineers’ little dominion. What is going on here?

  The arguing men were four Wasps and two Beetles. After his eyes had adapted to the light, Angved could place at least half of them, and from that he guessed they must all be very senior engineers indeed. In the centre of the knot was Colonel Lien, his gaunt face looking as bitter as ever with the knowledge that his inferior rank was all the authority the Engineering Corps could muster. They had never been granted a generalship, and the others would all be mere majors.

  Abruptly there was movement from behind Angved, with more hard and unsympathetic-looking guards arriving, and for a moment the engineer thought that he would just be hauled away again, his brief glimpse of this place just a mistake, punctuation on his road to some worse fate. The newcomers were delivering, however, rather than picking up, and someone slumped on to the bench next to Angved with a clink of chains.

  This newcomer had not been employed on factory duty. Angved would find out later that this was the difference between being blamed for the demise of a halfway secret and deniable desert skirmish and being blamed for the failure of a major invasion. He was thin enough to look starved, with a wild growth of beard and his hair matted and tangled. Between that and the dirt, it was hard to see much in his face save the creases and lines. Grime and harsh treatment went a fair way to bridging what was in reality a fifteen-year gap in their ages, and perhaps it was this that broke through Angved’s shell of self-absorption. For the first time since the Khanaphes business had gone sour, he found himself looking on someone else as a human being, a kindred spirit.