‘What about them?’ His tone showed that he had not even considered this.
‘I have two non-combatants here who are not part of this fight,’ Taki said desperately. ‘I wish to get them safely out of the city.’
‘Then they will provide the stakes,’ Axrad suggested. ‘We two shall duel, and if you happen to defeat me, our soldiers here will let everyone depart where they will, either go to fight again or go to flee. Is that clear, Sergeant?’
Che did not hear the other man’s response but assumed it must have been positive.
Taki slipped the crossbow back into the Esca’s canopy. She headed around her machine’s wing as though to see Axrad better, but when she was passing nearest to Che she said, ‘They won’t keep their side. He means it, but I bet they don’t. Once I’m in the air, get going. They’ll be busy watching us, and not you.’
In a louder voice, intended to carry to Axrad, she announced, ‘I’m all yours. Let me wheel my Esca onto the field, and then we’ll finish our business.’
Twenty-Three
‘This must be Lowlander work,’ the Emperor Alvdan hissed. He stood in his nightshirt, a dozen guards gathered about him. One fist was pressed nervously into his chin. ‘This can be no coincidence.’
‘It seems likely, your Imperial Majesty,’ Maxin allowed. He was not going to tell the Emperor that his own agents had sensed no warning of this, nor caught any Lowlander spies. Let us hope the Emperor asks no questions about this, he thought. Today was not the greatest day for the Rekef and, whoever had failed in this, Maxin was the man standing here with the Emperor in the pre-dawn darkness.
The word received had been that urgent: Major Berdic had been emphatic and his messenger insistent. The sight of the Fly-kinden man marching into the palace, in order to rouse the Emperor and the master of the Rekef, would stay with Maxin for some time. The man’s face had exhibited blank fear, but he had witnessed the plight of Szar and he knew his duty. Maxin had been forced to commend him for it.
‘If Szar… goes, how does it affect our campaign?’ Alvdan asked.
‘Hardly at all, your Majesty,’ Maxin assured him. ‘More in logistics than any serious threat to your power. And rest assured that Szar will not leave our hands. Somehow the news has got to these backward people that their Queen is dead.’ He felt a moment’s qualm in saying it before the guards, by force of long habit, but the secret had somehow leaked out despite all his precautions. Another failure attributable to his Rekef, if the Emperor should enquire further. Best to keep the man’s mind on the problem and not the causes of it. ‘Our manufacturing in the West-Empire will be disrupted until these rebels are put down, of course, but we have the Beetle city of Helleron to take up the slack as far as production goes. There is really only one matter worth troubling you with, your Imperial Majesty, and that is how far to go in punishing the Bee-kinden for their audacity.’
‘Punishment?’ Alvdan queried, the word bringing him back to himself. ‘Do not think that we are a fool, General. Revolution is like a disease, and just one infected city can make it spread. We read the reports, and not just yours either. We know Myna was close to an explosion last year, and simmers still. It was not so long since Maynes was also in open revolt. The whole West-Empire has been turbulent since the Twelve-Year War. We do not underestimate this development, General. We cannot shrug it off. Something therefore must be done.’ He lowered his fist at last, glaring about him at his guards. ‘Something final, General, because we have relied on Szar for too long. The Bee people are stubborn: they submit their backs to the lash and care not.’
‘Your Majesty?’
Alvdan’s eyes were now quite clear, and his voice quite calm. ‘We have pre-empted you, General – even before this latest news. When we first heard that Szar was stirring, we realized that they had heard. We knew that they would rise up, because she… she was the only thing holding them in check. When her leash finally snapped, we knew they would make their pathetic attempt at freedom. Now Colonel Gan has lost the Princess, who will become Queen, and they will all be up in arms. Your reinforcements will not hold them. No, we need a greater rod to chastise them with than just the army.’
Maxin glanced sidelong at the surrounding guards but they remained carefully expressionless. The Emperor thus taking the initiative in this matter was an unwelcome development. Alvdan was no fool, but Maxin was not wholly sure of his judgment. After all, he was supposed to live on a diet of whatever Maxin fed him, and that did not always include the entire truth.
‘If I may ask…’ he began slowly.
‘Oh, General, look at you!’ Alvdan said, with a bright smile. ‘Do you think we don’t need you any more? Non-sense! You are still our closest advisor. Our… no, we shall not quite call you brother.’
I remember well what I did to your brothers, on your command, Maxin thought.
Alvdan was plainly thinking the same thing. ‘We would call you a friend, save that Emperors have none. You are chief amongst our servants, and you must be satisfied with that.’
‘An honour, your Majesty,’ Maxin confirmed.
‘Of course. General, we now intend to make an example of Szar,’ Alvdan explained. ‘We have sent for a very special man, an executioner. He shall teach the provinces that the Empire is to be obeyed in all things, meekly and instantly. There shall be no spreading of revolution. Every city in the Empire shall know the name of Szar. It shall be the key to unlock all future revolutions, the cure for the infections of rebellion for all time to come.’
‘But who have you summoned, Majesty?’ said Maxin, almost impatiently.
Alvdan uttered a name, and it was a moment before Maxin had rifled through his capacious memory, but then he understood.
Maxin was a killer, who had taken the life of others for his own advancement so many times, and had countless more killed on his orders, but when he now put the idea together, the latest reports, the results of the tests, he shivered a little.
Szar is about to enter the histories, he considered. In fact the histories may be the only place left for it, when this is done.
He said I would notice no change.
The mirror was a fine piece of work in the shape of an hourglass, with a frame wrought from gold and silver filigree within which the shapes of dragonflies and butterflies hung suspended on fine wires. This was some trophy from the Twelve-Year War which had ended up, when nobody else had wanted it, here in her chambers.
It showed Seda only what she had always seen: a pale-skinned and slender Wasp-kinden woman, hair coiled neatly atop her head, with a vulnerability in her gaze that had been bred by long exposure to death and the cruel whims of her brother. Seda brushed back a lock of hair, and tried to see in the glass any sign of the magic that Uctebri claimed to have imbued her with.
Magic is subtlety, he had explained. It is better to work with the properties that exist, than seek to create something that is not there. You are already an admirable specimen of your kinden, therefore I shall merely hone your beauty.
It struck her that nobody had ever used that word to describe her, and that it should be left to the decrepit, blood-marked Mosquito to speak it made her sad.
If Father had lived, where would I be now? Married, no doubt, though to no one of her choosing. Alvdan, her brother, had never considered matching her with anyone, not even with his closest lackey, Maxin. He feared the ambitions of any children she might produce, let alone the ambitions of any husband she took, which would grow just as inevitably.
The one blessing of the revolution, Uctebri had told her, is that it meant magic’s day had passed. Why a blessing, you may ask? You did not believe in magic before you and I met and, among your fellow Wasp-kinden, all the way through the whole Empire, there is no belief in it. Superstition, you say dismissively to yourselves: ancient myth and foolishness. Thus it is that the simplest tricks of any magician can blind all eyes, because you Apt all accept whatever happens to you as if it made some kind of mechanical sense. A man goes suddenly
mad and slays his close friend and, where once he might have said, ‘I was enchanted,’ now he says, ‘He had it coming to him.’ He invents his motives after the event, and never thinks of the subtle influence that inspired him.
Seda shivered. Perhaps the look in her eyes had changed since she met Uctebri, whatever he said about her being unchanged. They now contained a knowledge and a worry more even than she remembered. He had opened doors that were better closed.
And yet he offered her escape, from her brother and from the death sentence that was ever stayed but always present. So she had made her compact with him, and now she could not turn back.
She had applied her make-up with a care and understatement that any Spider maid might be proud of. The gown she wore was pure white, and it cinched tight at her waist to emphasize the curve of her hips and her breasts.
Iam beautiful, she realized. Perhaps it was just Uctebri’s spell-weaving breaking through, but she saw her reflection and knew it to be true.
Her first suitor arrived shortly after: the lean and aged Gjegevey. The Woodlouse-kinden counsellor stopped in the doorway, seeing her reclining on a couch as if waiting for him. She saw that banded grey forehead of his lift in surprise.
‘Your, mmn, Highness,’ he murmured. His eyes had narrowed and she knew he must be sensing the enchantments that Uctebri had put on her. That was why she had summoned him first.
‘We have spoken before, Gjegevey,’ she began, ‘and I know you are no fool. I am sure, therefore, that you have heard rumours.’
‘Certain appointments have been, mmn, mentioned,’ the Woodlouse-kinden replied. ‘You know that I am, ah, fond of you. As a daughter, perhaps – or a great-granddaughter, might be, hmm, more appropriate. Yet I fear for you.’
‘The company I keep?’ she asked him.
‘Indeed. You have made, hrm, close association with a creature of more power and evil than you realize.’
‘You fear for my virtue?’ She gestured for him to sit beside her.
‘In a very real sense, your Highness.’ He poled himself across the room on his long legs, stilt-like with age, and lowered himself onto the couch.
‘Gjegevey,’ she continued. ‘I have been as good as dead for eight years. They might as well have buried me in my father’s coffin. But now I have a chance, and this man is my patron in that. If he possesses power, as you suggest, then at least he bends it to my advantage.’
‘And if he is evil?’ the Woodlouse enquired.
‘I am a princess of the Wasp Empire,’ she declared with pride. ‘My father made war on thousands and subjugated a dozen cities, and I am his daughter. What my brother has done, so would I, if I had seized the throne and not he. Let mystics plot and scheme, old man. Let it be the sacrificial knife or the sting of a common soldier, the victim makes no distinction.’
He remained silent for a long time, not looking at her, and any hint of his thoughts was lost in the eternal melancholy of his face.
‘Do you abandon me now?’ she asked gently. ‘Do you find yourself poised on the brink of a descent you had not meant to undertake? You have served the Empire since before I was born, and you cannot have been naive for so long.’
‘No, no,’ he admitted, his voice just a whisper. ‘Only that I had, mmn, thought perhaps that you… But you could not have lived in such innocence.’ He studied her closely then, watery eyes peering from a long, deeply lined face. ‘I came here to the Empire as a slave, but also as an agent for my, mmn, people, yes? I would thus act for my own people in guiding the Empire away from us… Not in these last twenty years have I so much as thought of that purpose. Whatever I might wish, I am as imperial now as any Wasp-kinden. No, I do not, hhm, abandon you. I shall serve you, if I can.’
‘Good. I am glad of that.’ And it was true. She liked Gjegevey, in a strange way. She did not think of him as a slave, barely even as a foreigner, for he had always been there. ‘I am to meet General Brugan shortly.’
Gjegevey nodded sagely. ‘A wise choice, if you can, hrm, win him over. He has never been one for allies, though. You will have to work carefully on him.’
With Uctebri’s help, I shall win him, even so, she thought, and shivered.
General Brugan had remarkable eyes. They were pale grey, so pale as to be almost colourless, like a clear sky reflected in steel. They were the only remarkable feature about an otherwise mundane-seeming man: his fair hair was cut short like a soldier’s above a heavy-jawed, brutal face, and his solid physique now running to fat about the waist. He strode in, clad in an edged tunic and leather arming jacket, and paused just inside the doorway, staring at her.
He did not look like a spymaster, but then she had met all three of the generals of the Rekef, and only Reiner did. She would soon need the Rekef, or at least some support within it. If the Rekef opposed her undividedly, then no amount of support from any other quarter would count. She could not woo General Maxin, and she had heard that General Reiner had gone to ground in the provinces, having lost out in the recent jostling for power. Her father had been careful to spread the weight of the Rekef across three separate pairs of shoulders but it was common enough knowledge that General Maxin, currently the Emperor’s favourite, was not the sharing sort.
And here was General Brugan. He had been a long time off in the East-Empire, long enough for people to forget about him as he went about his duties. Now he had come back, perhaps in response to Maxin’s powermongering, and here he was.
He is not so bad, maybe. She could not genuinely guess at his character but he was younger than Maxin, more athletic-looking than gaunt General Reiner.
‘My servant said you were asking for me,’ he said. His voice was wary and his eyes were suspicious, but they lingered on her. She felt her heartbeat pick up slightly, not at the close attention but the thrill of being able to wield influence at last, of whatever sort.
‘Your servant was correct,’ she replied. ‘It has been a long time since you were in Capitas, General, but I remember you. Will you not sit?’
‘You were but… a child then,’ he said, and she revelled in that slight catch in his voice. He approached cautiously, like a man suspecting a trap. ‘I have been away too long, it seems.’
‘Or perhaps you have returned just at the right time, General,’ she said. The words sounded awkward to her, but they stopped him, made him blink. He looked about the room swiftly.
‘We are not overheard, General, nor are we watched.’ A thin and whispery voice in her head made her start briefly, and then she repeated what it had told her: ‘save by your own followers.’
‘You are well informed,’ he noted.
‘You know where I grew into a woman, General, and under what restrictions. I am as well trained as any soldier in my own particular arts of survival.’
‘I’ll wager so,’ he agreed, and sat down on the couch across from her, watching her carefully.
‘You are worried I am merely bait for General Maxin?’ she said. She expected a harsh reaction to that name, but instead he smiled slightly, eyes still fixed on her.
‘I am not,’ he said. ‘I have always had my eyes here inside the palace, whatever he may have thought. I know you are no friend of his.’
‘Does that mean that you trust me, General?’
‘I would not be such a fool.’ But his voice was strangely hoarse.
‘General, my brother is always in Maxin’s company these days. Your eyes have witnessed that much, have they not?’
‘They have indeed.’
She leant towards him, wondering if Uctebri was working in his mind also. To think that she might be flirting at the same time with the cadaverous Mosquito-kinden was worse than unsettling, but she kept her mask up, moistening her lips, looking into those remarkable eyes of his and hoping not to discern a tint of red within them.
‘It is your duty to detect treason, is it not?’ she asked.
‘As a general of the Rekef Inlander, it is.’
‘But treason against what, General
?’
‘Against the Empire, Princess Seda.’
Her heart was in her mouth, but for joy, only joy, at such a grand concession. It was not only the title he gave her, a Dragonfly honour she had no true right to, but that he had named the state, and not the man: the Empire not the Emperor. She knew that Uctebri must be within his mind even now, with his unsuspected magic, but the thoughts he was teasing out from General Brugan were only those already grown there, buried deep beneath the man’s sense of duty and honour. Uctebri was just bringing the hidden part of Brugan into the light, perhaps a Brugan hidden even from himself.
‘Treason against the Empire is a deadly foe for all of us,’ she said, leaning even closer, finding him leaning in too, until mere inches separated their faces. His heavy features did not seem so coarse now, not with those shimmering metallic eyes to illuminate them. ‘I imagine it can occur even at the highest levels.’
‘At the very highest,’ he confirmed, so entranced now that he seemed a decade younger, years of harsh duties, betrayals and caution falling away from him, and she knew, just as he said it, that he was now hers.
The acting governor of Helleron was beyond the social pale. He held no dinners or dances, for nobody would have attended save under duress. He went to no entertainments, lest he darken the mood by his very presence. He was like the Empire’s bastard son, the Emperor’s favourite half-caste artificer-king and, save for his few apprentices, he had no intimates. Except for the demands he made of Helleron’s manufacturing power, he had no involvement with the city’s running.
It was a storm through which blue skies could be detected, the magnates of the Council said cautiously. In the Consellar Chambers they met, as they always had before the conquest, and ordered the daily life of the city. Within those walls it was as if General Malkan had never come to visit them and, so long as they adjusted their plans to fuel Drephos’s constant needs for manpower and raw materials, they were left to run the city however they chose.
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