‘I am aware, young man, that I will win no prizes for my beauty, but believe that I, therefore, judge no man on his face or blood,’ he said.
‘Drephos,’ Totho said softly. ‘And that other name, the long one. Moth-kinden names?’
‘My mother was left to name me. My father, unknown and unmourned, bestowed on her only so much of his time as it took to rape her. Wasp soldiers are not known for their benevolence towards prisoners or slaves. I suppose few soldiers are.’
‘But you said you were an artificer?’
The lopsided smile grew wider than seemed comfortable. ‘Remarkable, is it not? And yet something from my father’s seed has communicated to me all the workings of the world of metal, for here I am, so much of an artificer that they turn their hierarchy inside out to accommodate me. Without me the walls of Tark would still be whole, utterly unbreached. Yet my mother’s people sit in their caves and draw pictures on the wall, and pretend they are still great.’
Totho sank back into the chair. There was a feeling snagged deep inside him, because he was now interested. This maverick artificer, who seemed to have carved out some high station even amidst the Wasp Empire, had caught his imagination.
‘Was it your idea,’ Drephos asked softly, ‘to destroy my airships?’
And there was a leading question, and more what Totho had been expecting. It would be better, he thought, to return to familiar ground. ‘It was.’ He steeled himself.
‘Don’t be shy of it,’ Drephos said. ‘It was a well-planned raid. I’d guessed that the Ant-kinden hadn’t considered it. I have dealt with them before and there is not a grain of intuition in their entire race. But you saw the threat and acted, even as I myself saw our vulnerability. That is why I had two whole wings of soldiers on standby, to rush to the airships the very moment anything disturbed the camp. And just as well I did.’
So that was it: the final nail in the coffin for Totho’s desperate plan. He recalled in his mind a brief swirl of images, the fighting, the fury. A sudden lurch took him, and he tried to spring out of the chair. Even before the young woman had moved to restrain him, he was already toppling, the pain in his head making it impossible to stand. Her arms grappled his body, surprisingly strong, hauled him up and sat on him the edge of the chair.
‘Prisoners. ’ Totho muttered
‘Yes?’ Even with his eyes closed he could hear Drephos moving near.
‘You said you had taken prisoners. Other prisoners.’
‘Two to be precise, although one of them may not recover enough to be questioned.’
‘Was there.?’ He squinted up at the man. ‘Was there a Dragonfly-kinden man? He would have had-’
‘I know the Commonwealers, the Dragonflies,’ Drephos confirmed. ‘After all, the Twelve-Year War was the testing ground for some of my best inventions. I’m sorry, though, but the other prisoners are just Ant-kinden. If there was a Dragonfly last night, he has not been taken alive, nor did any escape, to our knowledge. I am afraid it seems most likely he is amongst the fallen.’
Eighteen
General Maxin took a last moment to understand his reports. They were a secret of his success, these reports. He had very able slaves whose sole task was to compile the wealth of information the Rekef Inlander brought, so he could then look through these few scrolls and read in them all he needed to know. Details could come later. Details he would ask for. For now he had his picture, his mental sketch of who was plotting, who was falling, who was on the rise or on the take.
And his information was not just fodder for the Emperor’s ears, either. Maxin had his own schemes. The Rekef was a young organization, created in the very closing years of the first Emperor’s reign by the man whose name the spies now bore. The structure and hierarchy had evolved over the next twenty years but at some levels it was still changing. Maxin had his own plans for it.
There were three generals of the Rekef, the idea being that each controlled his own particular section of the Empire, spoke to the others and reported to the Emperor. In practice, of course, those men who were ambitious enough to become generals in the Rekef did not suffer the interference of their peers.
And Maxin himself was winning. That was all he cared about. He was the man who sat amongst the Emperor’s advisers. General Brugen was chasing shadows and savages around the East-Empire amidst famine and bureaucracy and the stubbornness of the slave races. General Reiner was wrestling with the Lowlands. For the moment, Maxin was winning and he intended to keep it that way.
Of course there had been setbacks. Brugen was a conscientious man with more small troubles than his staff could conveniently cope with, so Maxin did not fear him. General Reiner was another matter, however. Only recently a man whom Maxin had raised to the governorship of a city, a man well placed for Maxin’s plans, had been disposed of by Reiner. The city, its Rekef agents and its considerable wealth, had then been put in the hands of Reiner’s shadow, the execrable Colonel Latvoc.
It had been a challenge to Maxin’s primacy, of course, but Maxin enjoyed challenges — as long as he won in the end.
He would win in the end. He had the Emperor ready to love him like a brother. Or perhaps not like a brother. After all, Maxin had overseen the murder of all the Emperor’s siblings bar one, and dealt with several other rivals at the same time. Nevertheless he had now presented the Emperor with perhaps the one gift all his Empire could not give him. It would be leverage enough, Maxin decided, to call for a major restructuring in the Rekef, and then Reiner and Brugen would understand, however briefly, that any army could only have one general.
He rolled up the scrolls and stowed them in the hidden compartment of his desk, then left to meet the Emperor.
They had moved the slave to a better cell, one with tapestries and carpets, some Grasshopper carvings for ornament, and no natural light. Uctebri had complained at the brightness of the gaslamps, though, and now oil lanterns hung randomly from the ceiling about his chambers, making them look more squalid than ever.
Still, he came to greet them at the first call of his name and Maxin knew they had been feeding him well enough. This scrawny creature seemed to have a remarkable appetite: it was not clear precisely where so much blood could go.
When the prisoner had presented himself, Alvdan circled him cautiously. Maxin knew the difficulties here were ones of belief. What the wretched old Uctebri had proposed was impossible, quite impossible, as any rational mind well knew. The thing the old Mosquito promised, the golden, impossible dream of sorcerers and ancient kings, belonged in the forgotten folk tales of slaves. When Uctebri spoke of it, though, it was hard not to remember that his very race was supposed to be extinct, to be entirely mythical. While he rasped the words, with his quiet certainty, his strange insistence, it was possible for the rational mind to be tricked into believing, just for a moment, that the quackery was real.
And Maxin now had access to a great deal of information. There was no single stockpile of words in Capitas, no library or archive, but through the channels of the Rekef his hands could reach a long way through the dusty scrolls of all the conquered and subject peoples of the Empire.
The Commonweal conquests had brought a great deal of lore into his possession. Most of it was the simple superstition of savages, but he had become more specific in the questions he was asking. There were a lot of Rekef agents in the conquered Dragonfly principalities who must have wondered just why he was asking them to dig up so much old myth and history.
The Commonwealers were writers whose early histories were given in elaborate, credulous detail. Here he had found signs of the thing the Mosquito had spoken of. Not enough to be certain, but enough to know that there had been something, at some time, that the man’s boasts were based on.
‘You wish to examine our sister,’ Alvdan said.
The hooded head bobbed. ‘It is necessary, Your Imperial Majesty.’
‘We had understood,’ the Emperor said, ‘that she was suitable. We believed you had proclaimed he
r suitable.’ He was now suspicious. Maxin liked him to be suspicious. When Emperors were suspicious they came to the Rekef for their suspicions to be eased, and, here in Capitas, Maxin was the Rekef.
‘Eminently suitable, Your Imperial Majesty,’ the Mosquito said. ‘However, there is no room for error. I must begin my calculations. Even now is not too soon, and such things cannot be hurried.’
‘This is nonsense,’ Alvdan said scornfully. ‘We believe none of this. What you claim cannot be done.’ He stomped away, but Maxin had heard the doubt in his voice, and he knew the Mosquito had too.
‘I am at your disposal,’ Uctebri said quietly. ‘I am your prisoner, your slave — I shall do as you command. There is none who can offer you this but I. No one else, your great Majesty.’
‘Maxin, you cannot really believe this. It goes against all reason,’ the Emperor protested, though in his eyes Maxin saw not fear or contempt, but a hunger. If only it were true, those eyes said, what could we do? What could we not do?
‘I have learned that there are things in this world that cannot be dismissed so easily. In your grandfather’s father’s time, Majesty, our own people had their own strange beliefs. One of which was that we would one day unite and rule the world. Who then would have believed it?’
‘But this is different, Maxin.’
‘Only in the type of belief it requires, Majesty.’
‘So you wish to examine our sister?’ Alvdan said, coming back to face the Mosquito. ‘And that will discomfort her. It will upset her. Good. We are growing to appreciate this plan. But then you say you need more? You do not have here at your disposal all that you need.’
‘It is indeed so, great lord. I have not the power, within my own being, for a work so great as this.’
‘So your charlatanry needs fuel to make it go, does it?’
‘I do not recognize such terms, great one,’ Uctebri said, with unctuous humility, ‘but I am sure you are correct.’
‘Your magic box — that is what you need us to retrieve for you?’ the Emperor added derisively. ‘If it were so effective, would it be so easy to locate — or even possible to take?’
Uctebri gave a strange whistling sigh and pulled his enveloping hood halfway back to scratch at his head. His red eyes flicked from Alvdan to the general. ‘Ruins and ash, Your Imperial Majesty, are all that remains of my people’s power, but those who wrought our downfall are now little better. The old days are gone, and shall not come again. Those that were once enthroned on high are cast down, and that which was venerated is spurned in the dust.’ His slender fingers intertwined. ‘This thing that lords and Skryres and princes would have fought for, when its value was known, is now a curiosity in the hands of the ignorant: ignorant men who profess knowledge, and yet know nothing of what they possess. But it has power yet — power that I can use for your benefit, worshipful Majesty.’
‘And if that power is used to our detriment, you know that we shall drain from you each drop of blood that you have fed on, creature,’ Alvdan told him. ‘Succeed and you shall find yourself most honoured amongst our slaves, but do not dream of betrayal.’
‘I am your prisoner. your slave,’ the Mosquito repeated, ‘and you may destroy me with a word, now or later, or when my tasks are done. I am most dependent on your good will, mighty one. When I have proved myself by this great service, you shall think kindly of me, I hope, and know that I can do yet more.’
‘Perhaps,’ Alvdan said doubtfully. ‘I have sent the orders, and they should arrive at the city of Helleron even now. Do you know Helleron? We have no free agents nearer your toy, but Helleron has its store of clever folk who do our bidding. The order has gone out to them. If this Box of the Shadow exists, and is where you say it is, they shall capture it for us.’
They brought the lady Seda in within two bells, as Capitas told time, dragged without warning from her own more sumptuous prison. She tried to fight free when she saw the emaciated, robed figure awaiting her, but the guard forced her in without difficulty, bound her to a chair easily, and now stood behind her, always a shadow in the edge of her vision. The Mosquito-kinden squinted at her, long fingers touching at one another, then parting.
‘Light and darkness,’ said Uctebri the Sarcad. He moved about the room almost hesitantly. ‘That is what life is about: all existence strung between those two poles. Or that is the way that we all used to see it.’ Eventually he made his mind up. ‘Shutter the lanterns,’ he said, and the guard looked at him curiously.
‘Sir?’ Uctebri was a slave still, with no rank as yet, but he was a man who had spoken to the Emperor and so the guard felt it wise to address him thus.
‘I cannot do it,’ the Mosquito said irritably. ‘Draw the shutters almost all the way. It is too bright in here for what I plan. I trust this will not discomfort you overmuch, Your Highness.’
It was already gloomy in there and, from her vantage point, Seda could see Uctebri as a dark-robed shape that grew less and less distinct as the guard tugged on the cords that controlled the lamps’ shutters.
‘You needn’t call me that,’ she remarked drily. ‘Nobody else does.’
The last shutter was now drawn nearly closed. She heard the guard carefully finding his way back behind her chair, felt his hand brush her shoulder as he checked her presence.
‘And yet I do,’ the Mosquito’s voice came. When he moved she could just make him out. When he stopped he disappeared in the dark. ‘It is the correct form of address for a lady of your rank, I believe?’
She heard a scratching sound from his approximate direction. ‘What are you doing, Mosquito-kinden?’
‘Drawing. Marking my notes,’ emerged his voice. ‘Light and darkness, great lady, our whole world is built between them. There are things that can be accomplished in the dark of the moon which are quite impossible at noontime. But it is not the hour that matters, only the light. If I can make it midnight within your mind, then there is nothing I cannot do, but if you have the will to keep the sun burning, then you are quite proof against me. But that art is long lost amongst your people.’
She heard the soft shuffle of his feet, her ears sharpening as she abandoned any reliance on her eyes. When she had come here, she had expected further taunts and jibes from her brother, but he had not been present. Instead there had been this chair, which she recognized from visits elsewhere. They kept chairs like this in prisons, for questioning. There had been none of the other apparatus she associated with the interrogator’s art, but she sensed that the Mosquito’s desires needed none.
He was very close when he spoke again. ‘It escapes the attention of your own kinden — as of other upstart races — that all the great powers of the Days of Lore could see in darkness, to a greater or lesser degree. The Mantids, the Spiders, and of course, best of all, the Moth-kinden and my own people. To know the dark, and not to fear it, was to control the world.’
He was now right at her elbow.
‘And then, of course, the great old night ended, and another kind of sun dawned. A revolutionary sun of machines and artifice that burned us all back into our hollows.’
‘How bitter you must feel,’ she said without sympathy.
‘Bitter?’ A croaky little laugh. ‘My people had already lost our chance for greatness. We were never many, but we had power and a yearning to use it. We had secrets that the Skryres of the Moths have never learned, and some that they might have, but that they deemed us evil, and made war on us to wipe us out, along with everything we knew.’
She gave a little squeak of panic as his pale, cold fingers brushed her cheek, his nails unexpectedly sharp.
‘And we are few now, so very few,’ he continued. ‘And yet they did not completely succeed, for that knowledge is still with us — and your brother is very, very interested in it.’
She had the sense of his eyes fixed on her. They had brought her here unprepared from her chamber, and she wore only a silken gown to keep the night out, and now the night was irresistible. She felt t
he touch of his fingertips drifting idly down her neck.
‘You. ’ From somewhere she marshalled a little courage. ‘This is an elaborate scheme of yours, Sarcad, simply to inflict yourself on a woman. Are your own kind so very few, after all?’
His rattling laugh came again. ‘Forgive me, Highness. I am an old man, but appetites die slowly in my tribe and you Wasp-kinden are a comely enough people — for an Apt race. You, especially, are a remarkably pleasing specimen of Wasp-kinden womanhood.’
‘And this is what it is all about, is it?’ She tugged at the straps of the chair, which was a futile enough struggle. ‘Or is this just some chance gift to you?’
‘Fear not, Your Highness. Your chastity is quite safe from me. The appetites I refer to are not sexual.’
‘Blood? Your people really drink the blood of others?’
‘As our namesakes do,’ he said, ‘and I consider myself something of a connoisseur. Royal blood, especially. Although I understand it is in short supply. Your father died not young but not old, yes?’
‘That is true.’
‘And there was suspicion at that?’ He was moving around the back of the chair, she sensed.
‘I would not pursue that line of enquiry, Uctebri, lest the guard report your words.’
‘Ah yes, the guardsman. Perhaps you could call on him.’
She frowned in the darkness. ‘For what purpose?’
‘As one ever calls on unknown powers, simply to see if they will come.’
‘You have.?’
‘He hears nothing, my lady, because I have put a magic on him. He sees nothing, and he hears nothing. Light and darkness, and of these two, darkness has the power. Your brother feared your father was killed. He feared even more being blamed for that death, and therefore no investigation, no suggestion was ever allowed to be raised. Your people’s empire is young, its succession untried. Your brother decided that to secure his position he would take drastic measures. He was advised in this by Colonel Maxin — as he then was.’
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