Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘You are not the only earthbound guest who has come here. For visitors, there are places set aside close to the edge,’ he explained.

  ‘Close to the edge?’

  ‘Why of course,’ he told her, smiling. ‘Tharn is a city, not just this fac¸ade. In building it we have delved all the way into the mountain.’

  ‘But . . . the sun . . . ? How do you . . . ?’

  ‘The dark is no barrier for us. Nor is it for you,’ he reminded her.

  Beneath the mountain, in that darkness that was not darkness, the mind played tricks. Although this circular room’s walls were picked out in subtle shades of grey, so that the inscriptions and carvings that twined across them were clear to her sight, her mind still knew that they were black as night, and never intended for her eyes. Her ears strained, and by straining, heard.

  ‘Achaeos,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I can hear music.’

  ‘It’s just the sixth hour.’ He had been pacing, seeming more nervous now within the halls of his people than he had been in the city of his enemies.

  ‘The sixth . . . hour? I don’t understand.’ She heard it more clearly now, and it seemed as though, deep within the mountain, a chorus of high, sweet voices was singing words she could not quite disentangle.

  He halted, turning towards her, a smile starting that had been lacking since they left sight of the open air. ‘But of course you cannot know. This is my home, so I think of its habits as my habits. Forgive me. Children of my people are given to choirs whose voices announce the changing of the hours. This is the hymn to the sixth hour of night. I remember singing it myself, when I was only seven or eight years. I still recall the words.’

  ‘It’s . . . beautiful.’ And it was: beautiful and solemn, like all this place, and racked with sorrow. ‘But don’t you have clocks?’ She suspected even as she said it that they did not. No mechanisms, no devices, no artifice here. They were an alien people to her.

  But Achaeos replied, ‘Of course we have clocks. Water clocks fed from the mountain rains which keep the best time we need, but we record the hours for many reasons, ritual and practical, and by these voices everyone may know how the night passes.’

  ‘I would assume most people would be asleep,’ said Che, and corrected herself even before he opened his mouth. ‘But of course not. Night is when your people are most busy.’ And he nodded.

  ‘That is why the Skryres will shortly hear us,’ he agreed. ‘I’d hoped to have more time to prepare our case, but they have already known that I was coming, and why, and with whom, so we must brave it out.’

  ‘These . . . Skryres.’ She stumbled over the unfamiliar word. ‘They lead you? They are your statesmen?’

  ‘More than that. I am a seer, and thus I have started on the road of knowledge. They are not near its end, for no one is, but they are so far along it that I cannot even imagine what they know: of men’s minds, of the universal truths, of the Art and the forces of the world. We are not ruled by the strongest or the richest, or those who can talk most smoothly. We are ruled instead by the wisest and the most terrible. Che, you must be careful not to offend them.’

  But it is you who are afraid, she realized. She wanted to ask him what these Skryres might do if he failed to move them but, even as she stood up to go to him, a door opened seamlessly in one wall, carvings sliding into carvings, an age of history being devoured. A robed Moth-kinden stood there, older than Achaeos, though she could not judge by how much. His pale eyes narrowed when they saw her.

  ‘It is true then,’ the newcomer said in a hard, quiet voice. ‘You have been corrupted.’

  ‘That is not for you to judge,’ Achaeos told him sharply. ‘I will put my case before the Skryres.’

  ‘How fortunate,’ said the stranger, ‘since that is what they wish also. You are to come with me.’ His nose wrinkled at the thought. ‘Both of you.’

  The capacity of Che’s vision could just encompass the room they were taken to, and then led to the centre of. In the heart of the mountain was an amphitheatre, stepping up and up in tiers, the steps themselves worn smooth and rounded by the councils of antiquity until at the very last it rose to terminate in high walls, disappearing out of sight into the lurking darkness. There were lamps up there, which surprised her at first: dim, pale lamps burning coldly blue and shedding only the faintest of pale radiance.

  The seats were burdened with the Moth-kinden, for in the room sat several hundred of them at least, a crowd in Beetle terms but a multitude amongst this more reclusive people. They could not, she decided, all be the Skryres, yet they all looked alike to her, grey-skinned and white-eyed, all robed as Achaeos was, their heads close together as they whispered. She did not need to speculate on what had caught their imagination. Slim-fingered hands picked her out as she entered, pointing as they followed her progress across the floor. She saw blank eyes flash angrily, and sudden fierce gestures. The assembly of Moths stared down on her with loathing as cold as the lamps above them.

  The fear that had already been quickening in Achaeos took hold of her now. She was in a strange place and she had somehow assumed that all these people would be like Achaeos or Doctor Nicrephos, the only Moths she had ever known. She knew that they disliked her race, so she had been ready for shouting, perhaps, or rough shoving, the way her own people would show hostility. Not this, though. Not this cool distaste lancing through her, as though she were nothing more than the insect itself, a grubby beetle crawling beneath their glare. She wanted to stretch out her hand for Achaeos, as the only comfort she could hope for, but he was beyond her reach, fighting his own monsters.

  We were their slaves once, she thought helplessly. Before the revolution we sweated for them, built for them, smithed for them. They had clearly not forgotten. Here, beneath this massed gaze of contempt, she was nothing but a slave again, daughter of a lesser people, fit only for brute work or for their amusement.

  It was the force of their attention and their Art, like a physical thing, compressing and limiting her to make her the thing they believed she should be. She looked back and forth across that unforgiving crowd for any relief.

  They could have me killed right here and never care.

  Then her gaze met a face whose eyes had pupils. There were soldiers there as well, a mere quartet of them to guard this angry host from the intolerable fact of her. They were neither help nor comfort though, for their arrogant looks held her in even less esteem. They were Mantis-kinden, dressed in pale armour of leather and metal. Their forearms were jagged with spines, and each bore the same gauntleted claw that Tisamon wore. If the order came then these would be the executioners. It was for these, then, that the lamps were lit. Mantis eyes were good but they could not manage the deepest of darknesses.

  As mine can. Irrationally, this thought gave her some small hope.

  From a dark doorway across from her more Moths began to emerge. She could tell, ignorant as she was, that these must be the Skryres and therefore all the others mere spectators. They wore robes of a differing cut to their kin, no finer cloth but the hoods peaked high, and the drape of their skirts folded and flowed like water. On their brows they wore pale metal, coronets or diadems for some, ornately inscribed skullcaps for others. Although she found it difficult to judge Moth-kinden ages, she could see that most of these men and women were very old. Some even had wrinkles, or grey in their dark hair, which would have spoken of five decades in a Beetle but here could mean, she guessed, a century or more.

  They did not sit down, however old they were, and though some held to carved staffs, they all stood straight as lances. Their stares did not reveal the same hostility as the others, but something beyond that, and Che felt she was being evaluated in ways she could not guess at.

  A man whose skullcap dipped in a sharp widow’s peak above his nose rapped his staff once on the floor, and by the time it echoed each and every Moth there had fallen still and quiet. All their eyes were fixed on Che still, with no more love than before.

  ‘
Come forth, advocate, and speak,’ the Skryre demanded, and in her innocence Che thought he meant Achaeos. She looked to him, waiting for him to explain it all, to transform their hate into something warmer, but his own attention drew her to a newcomer coming in by the same way that they had entered. It was a Moth woman, not much beyond Achaeos’s age perhaps, and she carried a ceremonial staff, gold-capped, on which winged insects of all kinds chased one another, layering over each other in an eye-twisting tide.

  ‘Make your accusations,’ the Skryre said, and Che now realized that this was the advocate, and the situation was worse than she had thought.

  ‘Tharn accuses the man named Achaeos, who stands now before you,’ the advocate announced. Her voice was low, but it carried all the way to the upper walls, lifted by the elegant architecture of the place. ‘Achaeos, neophyte and raider, fell wounded in battle with the Hated Enemy. He was seen to flee, as should be done, but the next dusk did not find him back in his proper place. Instead, our eyes and ears within the Forging City heard that he had chosen his own path and committed himself to the cause of another. He sought then to leave for eastern lands, for he claimed some greater enemy awaited him there. See how now he skulks back having leagued himself with the Hated Enemy. He has even brought one of them to our very halls. He has clearly lost his way in the temptations of the outer world and been corrupted. He is lost to us and thus Tharn can have no home for him. I call for his exile, his exile or his death, whichever his courage prefers.’

  The thought made Che cold that, while Achaeos was worth accusing, worth the bother of a trial, she herself was considered nothing. She would live or die by no merit whatsoever of her own. She was now at the mercy of Achaeos’s words.

  ‘You have been accused,’ said the Skryre who had spoken before. ‘Achaeos, once a son of Tharn, what can you say to this?’

  ‘I had not expected such accusations,’ Achaeos said hotly, but Che heard his voice tremble. ‘What I have done has been for Tharn. Would I have come back here, if I was guilty of all this?’

  ‘Such things are said by all who come here,’ chimed the advocate’s voice behind them. ‘How can a single neophyte weigh the good of a city while cut off from our counsel and pursuing his own ends? There are many who leave yet try to return, believing a few meagre words may heal this rift. This is no adequate explanation.’

  ‘You disappoint us,’ the Skryre said to Achaeos. ‘Speak of your fall from grace, Achaeos.’

  ‘There is a foe now gathered at the gates of the Forging City that will threaten even our halls of Tharn,’ Achaeos said, but Che could sense that he was losing both his composure and his train of thought. ‘I have seen them myself, seen their armies: a race of the Apt in countless numbers, flying where they please. They are at the gates of the Lowlands now, and it may seem a wonderful thing to you all that they have their swords at the Enemy’s throat, but those swords are whet for all of us. They know no allies, no equals, only enemies and slaves. I have seen this. I have uncovered this.’

  ‘What is he asking of us?’ the advocate said, and Che, sick of her voice, wanted to turn round and hit her. ‘Can he be asking for us to aid the Hated Enemy now that they are at odds with some cousin-race of theirs? He has been swayed by them. He has been lost to them. He even brings them here as his allies. Look at this coarse creature he chooses as his companion! He cares nothing for Tharn now. His loyalties lie elsewhere.’

  Che turned on her then, but managed to keep her temper in check. All about them, across the tiers of seats, Moths had stood up suddenly. She realized this was their way of shouting, of heckling. They would not speak out of turn in front of their leaders, and so they merely stood to show their opposition to Achaeos, their support for the advocate’s words.

  ‘I defy that!’ Achaeos cried. ‘I am no traitor to my people!’

  ‘He would not be the first, either. The Hated Enemy have their tricks and ways to seduce even our best. They offer their promises of opportunity, their gold, their devices that cannot be comprehended. Who knows what has called him from the true path, but it is certain that he is lost to us.’

  ‘We are under deadly threat!’ Achaeos said desperately. ‘And you cannot ignore that. Whatever the Enemy might do, whatever I might do, there is an Empire out there that cares nothing for a thousand years of history, that seeks only to write its own name in our dust! We have resisted the Forging City for a century, but if we stood alone against this Empire we would not have one more month to live in freedom!’

  ‘Enough, Achaeos,’ interrupted another Skryre, a woman who seemed perhaps the oldest of them all. Achaeos bared his teeth, but could not manage to speak as she walked carefully forward. The single sound in all that echoing chamber was the rap of her wooden staff on the stone floor.

  ‘We do not credit your words,’ she said simply, and a shudder went through Achaeos that chilled Che to witness it. ‘The world cannot change so swiftly, and these newcomers, these men of black and gold, are the enemies of our enemies and have so far shown us no harm. You are condemned, either exile or death, unless you would submit yourself to us.’

  Achaeos seemed frozen, and Che could not understand what the woman meant. Submit, she urged him mentally. Exile or death, what could be worse?

  The woman reached out a hand, claw-thin with age, and Achaeos shrank away from it. He seemed like a cornered beast without means of escape, broken.

  ‘Achaeos,’ she continued, and there was something kindly in her voice, some kind of sympathy. ‘We are not unjust, as you well know. We give you this chance to show us, with no masks or lies, the truth of your words. Or else we must wonder what you would hide from us, and the advocate’s judgment shall stand.’

  This time, Che could not stay silent. ‘Let her!’ she hissed, and her voice rippled disapproval across the audience of Moths. ‘Let her do it, whatever it is!’

  He cast her a look that was filled wholly with guilt. Not fear, but guilt.

  She thought she understood, then, what it was that he could not show them. ‘Then let me,’ she said, and his look turned to horror, and almost every one of the Moths around them was again on his feet, so that a great wave of disapproval fell crashing over her.

  But she endured, as her race always had. ‘Whatever you want. I’ll do it. I can show you exactly what the Wasp-kinden are like, better than Achaeos here, better than anyone.’

  ‘Heed not her words. She has no leave to speak here,’ said the advocate from behind.

  And Che decided that she would actually strike the woman, had even taken two paces forward, when the Skryre, the old woman, spoke. ‘What is this prodigy?’

  Around them, men and women were resuming their seats, aware that there was something here they had, in their animosity, passed over. Even the advocate looked uncertain.

  ‘Come here, Beetlechild,’ said the Skryre, and Che turned and approached her slowly. Her blank eyes were nested in wrinkles but their gaze was steady as stone. ‘You would submit, would you? Submit to what?’

  ‘Whatever you were going to do to him,’ Che said. ‘Your Art or your . . . whatever it is you do.’

  ‘No Art, Beetlechild. Art alone cannot lay a mind bare. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I think I do.’ She stood before the woman, bracing herself, and only then did she realize that the old woman was no taller than she. A moment before she had seemed towering.

  ‘You cannot do this,’ one of the other Skryres said softly. ‘She is the Enemy.’

  ‘It is an abuse of our power,’ added another. ‘We will suffer for it.’

  ‘And yet . . .’ A third, the skullcapped man who had spoken first, came forward. Abruptly his hand was on Che’s chin, dragging her head around to look at him. ‘What can she believe? What can she understand? There is something in her beyond her kind’s blindness. I feel no fear in her, or very little.’

  That ‘very little’ felt like a great deal of fear to Che, but she stood, steadfast, and waited, and when they simply exchanged looks
, she said, ‘Do it. Please, just do whatever you want, whatever you need.’

  ‘What are you, Beetlechild? What path do you walk?’ asked the old woman.

  ‘I am a scholar of the Great College,’ Che said with pride.

  ‘It has been known.’ The old woman nodded sagely. ‘Not within living memory, but it has been known for such a one to seek knowledge amongst us. To have an open mind. I will examine her. I will pay the cost for it, if cost there be. I do this of my own will.’

  There were dissenting looks from some of the other Skryres, but they held their peace.

  ‘Think of nothing,’ said the old woman, and placed her cool, thin hand on Che’s forehead.

  Think of nothing? came the instant riposte from Che’s thoughts. Nobody can think of nothing. It cannot be done . . . And while she was distracting herself with such tautology the Moth woman entered her mind.

  Che was not sure what she was expecting. Perhaps a cold force reaching into her brain, talons ripping there, digging for what they sought. She felt nothing, except . . . except after a while it was as though there was a babble of voices at the very edge of her hearing, and all of these voices were her own . . .

  And she snapped back to the moment, for the Skryre had drawn her hand away and Che could not even tell how much time had passed. She swayed, abruptly dizzy, those blandly hostile faces swimming all around her. The hard floor of the chamber struck her knees a moment later. Then she was lying on her side, feeling the entire mountain of Tharn revolve gently with herself as the hub. She struggled to sit up, at least, casting about for sight of the Skryres.

  The old woman stared bleakly at her, and for a moment Che thought she had failed whatever test had been set her.

  ‘You have been into the woods of the Darakyon,’ the Skryre announced. ‘And you have seen there what your people have not ever seen before. Achaeos has much to answer for in this.’

  Che’s heart sank, and she looked helplessly across at him. His face was set expectantly.

  ‘You have seen the Empire of the Wasp-kinden, and you have seen that they devour everything that falls their way. They have no friends. They leave no place untouched. They believe only in conquest. That is what you believe, but what is a Beetlechild’s belief, to us?’