Empire in Black and Gold sota-1

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  At that moment the most delicious aroma entered the tent, preceding a soldier bearing a platter. There was dried fruit on it, and nuts, and what must be honey, and a half-dozen slices of steaming meat that must surely be horse. She found that she had taken two steps towards the table as soon as it was set down.

  ‘Help yourself,’ he offered, as the soldier left. She was instantly on her guard, but he shrugged. ‘Or not? You will profit nothing from abstaining. A moral victory on this small point would be an empty one, would it not?’

  And she had to concede that. She had to concede that, because she had eaten slave food for two days and she was unable to take her eyes off the plate. By awkward stages she sat and took up a piece of meat, bolting it even as it burned her fingers. She saw Thalric’s expression then, and recognized it as that of a man who had won the first battle of a campaign. She hated him for that, but did not stop eating.

  ‘You must have a very skewed picture of the Wasp-kinden,’ he told her. ‘If you think of us at all, you must think that we’re savages.’

  She nodded vigorously, still eating.

  ‘Not so far from the truth,’ he admitted, and she raised surprised eyebrows. ‘The Empire is young. Three generations, three Emperors.’

  She frowned at him.

  ‘No, we don’t live for hundreds of years. Nothing like that. Our Most Revered Majesty Alvdan the Second is not thirty years of age. His grandfather was one tribal chieftain in a steppeland full of feuding tribes, but he had, as the story goes, a dream. He took war to the other tribes, and he subjugated them. He brought all the Wasp-kinden together under his banner. It took a lifetime of bitter fighting and worse diplomacy. His son, Alvdan the First, built the Empire: city after city brought into the fold, the borders pushed ever outwards. Each people we made our own, we learned the lessons they taught us. We honed the tool of war until it was keen as a razor. Our Emperor now, Alvdan Two, was sixteen when he came to the throne, and since then he has not rested in furthering the dream of his father and his grandfather. We have fought more peoples than the Lowlands even knows exist. We have defended ourselves against enemies who were stronger than us, or wiser than us, or steeped in lore we could not guess at. We have conquered internal strife and we have done what no other has ever done before us. The Empire is physically near the size of the entire Lowlands, but all under one flag and all marching to one beat. The Empire represents progress, Miss Maker. The Empire is the future. Look at my people. They have a foot in the barbaric still. They must be forced into discipline, into control, into civilization! But they have come so very far in such a short time. I am proud of my people, Miss Maker. I am proud of what they have brought about.’

  ‘So why inflict their regime on other people?’ she demanded.

  ‘Because we must grow lest we stagnate,’ he replied, as though it was as very simple as that. ‘And because those who are not within the Empire remain a threat to it. How long before the Commonweal takes arms against us, or some Ant general similarly unifies the Lowlands? How

  long before some other chieftain with the same dream raises the spear against us? If we were to declare peace with the world, then the world would soon take the war to us. Look at the Lowlands, Miss Maker: a dozen city-states that cannot agree on anything. If we were to invade Tark tomorrow, do you know what the other Ant-kinden cities would do? They would simply cheer. That is the rot of the Lowlands, Miss Maker, so we will bring them into the Empire. We will unite the Lowlands under the black-and-gold banner. Think what we might accomplish then.’

  ‘All I can think of is that you would turn my race, and all the Lowlands, into slaves within your Empire.’

  ‘There are many Beetle-kinden in the Empire, Miss Maker. They do very well. The Emperor trusts most of the imperial economy to them, as far as I can make out. The Empire needs slaves to do a slave’s work, but we would not enslave the Lowlands. The people of the Lowlands would simply discover that their best interests lie in working with us.’

  ‘Tell me, Captain, what is the Rekef?’

  The question caught him quite by surprise, but in the next moment he was smiling again, as though she had, at last, proved a promising student. ‘Well, how has that word come to you?’

  ‘Brutan, amongst others.’

  ‘The Rekef, Miss Maker, is a secret society.’

  She had to laugh at that. ‘But everyone seems to know you’re in it so how can it be secret?’

  ‘Well, that is rather the point.’ His smile looked a little embarrassed. ‘Why, after all, would you be part of a terrifying secret society that strikes fear into the hearts of men, if nobody even knows that you’re in it? In actual fact, if I was Rekef Inlander then the first anyone would know about it would be when they found themselves hauled in and being put to the question, with a list of their crimes before them.’ His smile became self-mocking. ‘To tell the truth they even frighten me. I, on the other hand, am Rekef Outlander. My place is dealing with people like you.’ He paused, searching her face. ‘Have I reached you, Miss Maker? Have you heard what I have said?’

  ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I remember. . when I was in Helleron with Salma — the Dragonfly-kinden, although I’m sure you know that — when we were there, we saw a factory, and he said he had thought that we Beetle-kinden didn’t keep slaves. And I told him not to be so ridiculous, because they weren’t slaves. They were working for a wage. They were there of their own free will. But I couldn’t persuade him. Whatever I said, I couldn’t make him see that they were free. Perhaps that was because he was right.’

  Thalric’s smile was still there, but bleak, very bleak. ‘Your point is elegantly made, Miss Maker.’

  She put down her goblet, composed herself. ‘What will you do with me?’

  He looked down at the scroll before him and ticked off a few items carefully with a scratchy chitin-nibbed pen. She thought at first he was only trying to make her squirm, but then realized that he really was thinking what might be done with her.

  ‘I will call you for another conversation — at Asta perhaps. Another chance for you to talk to me, before the artificers become involved, or your Dragonfly friend is hurt. Until then. . let us hope the dreadful reputation of the Rekef suffices to stave off Brutan’s advances.’

  ‘You’re. .?’ She didn’t want to ask it. She knew it would make her look weak. ‘You’re not going to. .?’

  He looked up at her, face quite without expression. ‘Guards!’ he called suddenly, and then, more softly: ‘No, Miss Maker. I cannot see how that would serve any purpose. Not yet.’

  He was so very smug behind that bland facade. He was so very in control that, as the soldiers came in, she did something very unwise, knowing it to be so even as she did it.

  ‘Whose children did you kill?’ she asked.

  His nib snapped, its tip leaping across the tent. For a second he held himself very still, while she could see the great shadow of his anger pass across his face, and something else, too, some other emotion his features were not designed for. The soldiers had paused halfway towards her. She thought even they were holding their breath.

  At last he let his anger out in a long sigh. ‘Take her back to the pens,’ he instructed, not looking at his men. The shadow of that other emotion was still there on his face.

  Twenty

  Stenwold walked carefully into the firelight, and let her see him coming. Totho was still clattering about beneath the automotive, and the Moth’s eyes were closed in what Stenwold hoped was sleep. He sat down, not across from her, not next to her, but at an angle, a no-man’s land. She stared at him sullenly.

  ‘I think it’s time,’ he said, ‘that I told you some things. About yourself.’

  ‘You obviously know nothing about me,’ she told him coldly, ‘or you would have realized that I would follow you — you and. . and him — when you went away to talk.’

  The world seemed to die around him in that moment, like au
tumn arriving all in one day.

  ‘You followed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you heard?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘This isn’t how I wanted it, Tynisa.’

  ‘I’m not sure you even know how you wanted it,’ she told him harshly. ‘Why, Stenwold? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to find out this way? Why not ten years ago? Why not five years ago? Or even two?’

  He felt terribly old now. ‘Tynisa, I didn’t tell you because I had not yet told Tisamon.’

  ‘But you. .’ Her face twisted. ‘So you’d rather. . So I. .’

  He held his hand up, and to her credit she let him speak. ‘If I had told you at twelve or fifteen that your father was a Mantis-kinden hired sword working out of Helleron, then I know you would have wanted to meet him, even if it was just to see the man who abandoned your mother. I would have forbidden it, but I do know you, and I know you would have found a way. And if you had confronted him, looking like you do, so like her, he would have killed you. That is nothing more than the truth.’ He rubbed at his forehead. ‘And so I made the resolution to say nothing. I might have broken that resolve, but. . but you never asked. Never. You never asked who your parents were.’

  Her expression showed pure betrayal. ‘I didn’t need to ask who they were. I thought. .’ Her voice was starting to shake. ‘I thought that you. .’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘you couldn’t have thought that.’ Because, of course, that was the gossip when he had arrived at Collegium with a motherless child in his arms: that she was the fruit of some indiscretion of his. It had been a minor scandal. The child’s pale skin had told its tale, though, and when the child grew, it became obvious to all that nothing so heavy and down-to-earth as Beetle blood was flowing in her, and the questions multiplied but the speculation died away, and he had thought that particular rumour must have been put in its grave long before now. But here it was again, and he was confronted with it from its very source.

  ‘What was I supposed to think?’ she demanded. ‘You raised me. You looked after me.’ The firelight showed tears of pain and frustration tracking down her cheeks. ‘You’re my father. Until last night, that was who you were, to me. I never thought. .’ A sob, choked back. ‘Or if I did, I stopped myself thinking. And now you’re just. . I’m just. .’

  ‘I did everything I could for you,’ he told her sadly. ‘I did bring you up as if you were my own. It was my promise to Atryssa. I gave you the best start in life that I could think of, in Collegium. I even found a sister for you, so that you would always have company. I did everything but tell you the truth.’

  She was silent, it seemed to him, forever, staring into the fire. He felt like a man walking a tightrope, Tisamon to one side and Tynisa to the other. I was never meant forsuch juggling.

  ‘Tell me about her,’ she said at last. ‘How did it happen? What could have possibly gone wrong, to put me in the world?’

  ‘Please-’

  ‘Tell me.’

  He settled back. ‘It’s a story you should recognize. We met in Collegium — at the College itself. I know it seems absurd that he,’ a nod towards the solitary Tisamon, ‘could ever have been a student, but he came to Collegium hunting I know not what, something he could not find at home. We were the strangest group. We fought in the Prowess. They were all so good and I was a liability, but they carried me with them.’ The memory hurt more than he would have thought: the sweetness of those innocent days stuck in his throat.

  ‘What was she like?’ That question, coming from the very mirror of Atryssa? This night did not feel real to him any more.

  ‘She stepped off a boat into Collegium with nothing but the clothes she wore. Everybody loved her and the city never knew what had hit it. She got everything she asked for. I think she was from one of the great Spider houses, the Aristoi they call them. But they had fallen on hard times, lost their footing in the dance. She didn’t speak much about it, never looked back. She was Spider-kinden, after all. She could do all the things that they do, intrigue with the best of them, but. . she had a heart, and she was a friend, and I think we all loved her, just a little. Your mother.’ The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day. Debates in the chambers, duels at the Prowess, learning artifice from the masters. As a young man, with the world ahead of him and no worries, none.

  ‘As for Tisamon, he came from Felyal, where the real fanatics live. He hated her race. He hated her, at first. Even then he was the best fighter anyone had ever seen, but she herself was close on the second. They would duel together in the Prowess Forum all the time. Each one could find no other to challenge their skills. She gave him something no other could, and he came to love her even as they fought. Mantis-kinden! And when they love and hate, it is with all their being. And he hated himself, at first, because he thought he was betraying his own race. Oh it was a difficult business. And yet your mother worked on him, and broke his defences down.’ He reached around for his pack, opened it up. ‘I’ve something I should show you, I think, at this point. It’s been a long time waiting for you to see it. I’ve carried it to many places. Coming to Helleron, I thought. . well, there was always a chance.’ He withdrew a flat leather wallet and opened it to reveal a canvas perhaps a foot across. With great care he folded it out so that she could see.

  Two decades ago the fashion in painting groups was to have them surprised in some domestic scene. So it was that the five figures here were in a taverna somewhere, turning to look at the viewer as though suddenly interrupted in some drinking discussion. The paint had scuffed, in places, flaked and chipped, but the picture was still clear. Tynisa stared.

  Seated left of centre was a young Beetle who could have been Stenwold’s son, save that he had never had one. Still stocky, slightly round at the waist. She looked from that cheerful, smiling face to the solemn one the fire now danced on, trying to bridge the chasm time had made.

  Standing behind his chair was Tisamon: there was no doubt of that. The artist had caught him perfectly, down to the hostile expression on his sharp features, a threat to the intruder. His right hand, almost out of sight behind Stenwold’s chair, wore the metal gauntlet of his folding claw. In the far left of the picture, a bald, knuckle-faced Fly leant back in his chair, a bowl of wine tilted in one hand, seemingly on the very point of overbalancing. Across from him was a darkly serious Ant-kinden man, his back turned three-quarters to the viewer, the links of his chain-mail hauberk picked out in minute detail.

  In the centre of the picture, sitting on the table with her legs dangling, was a girl whose face Tynisa had herself watched grow from a child’s to a woman’s, in daily mirrored increments. At that point — in the frozen piece of time the artist had preserved — it was as though it was she herself amongst those strangers.

  The picture was signed, ‘Nero’, in small strokes.

  ‘Tisamon — and me, of course,’ Stenwold said, seeing even as he said it that there was no ‘of course’ about his younger image. ‘That’s Nero himself, the one with the wine. He had a trick with mirrors, to paint his own image in. Nero lives still, usually trawling around the south, Merro, Egel and Seldis. The Ant is Marius. He. . died. And of course, that’s Atryssa. The most beautiful woman I ever knew.’ He found himself looking from the painted likeness to the living one. ‘I had thought that your father’s blood would show but, as you grew, year by year, you were more like her. No mother could give her child a greater gift.’

  ‘Except to stay with her,’ said Tynisa sadly. ‘Tell me the rest, Stenwold. I have to know.’

  ‘And we went our ways. Marius went back to Sarn and the army. I stayed at Collegium. Your mother and father made a living as duellists, out Merro way. I was early, perhaps even the first, to discover what was raising its head up east of the Lowlands. I followed my researches and they led me to the Empire. I called for my friends and they came, even though Marius had to leave his beloved city for me. We agreed to work against the
Wasps. We saw some of their plans, and we knew that the Lowlands were just another point on the map for them, another place to conquer. You’ve heard of the city of Myna, and you know what happens next. It seemed destined to fall beneath the Empire’s boot, so we agreed to regroup there and see if the Wasps could be stopped before its gates. Nero dropped out — Fly-kinden always know the best time to make an exit. The rest of us. . When we met, Atryssa wasn’t there. And then we were betrayed. The defenders of Myna were betrayed. It seemed that only one of us could have done it. And Atryssa wasn’t there. It broke Tisamon, or nearly. Because he had loved her, in spite of everything he believed about her people.’

  For a moment Stenwold could not go on. The sound of a city dying was still in his mind. He remembered the citizens of Myna out in the streets, Wasp soldiers coursing overhead, the breaking of the gates: the bitter taste of failure and betrayal. He remembered the desperate fight on the airfield. Marius’s soldiers retreating, shields held high. Marius calling. Marius, dying in the orthopter. The grief and rage and loss that had become Tisamon’s whole world.

  ‘Marius died as we fled Myna, and if I hadn’t stopped him, Tisamon would have got himself killed as well.’

  ‘But she didn’t betray you?’

  ‘To this day I do not know who did, save that, after all this time, I know it was none of my friends,’ Stenwold replied. ‘But it was too late, then. Too late for Marius. Too late for Atryssa. Too late for all of us.’ The end of his golden days. The shadows gathering. Tisamon was right: Stenwold had become what he had despised. He had gone on to set himself against an Empire, and he had made his students his pawns, and some of them had suffered, and some of them had died.

  ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Tynisa asked him. ‘Knowing this, with him? Help me, I feel like I’m losing my world.’

  He reached out and she took his hand gratefully. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what am I? I thought I was yours, and now I’m just some. . mistake? Some cast-off?’