‘Maxin killed my brothers and sisters,’ Seda confirmed. There was still no sound from the guard. She knew it was impossible but, in this darkness, with that scratchy voice behind her, she found she could believe Uctebri’s claim to magic entirely. ‘He only left me alive because, so long as I live, he knows exactly where the threat will come from. If I die, any number of others might rise to be his chief enemy — or all combine against him. My brother feels so secure on his throne that people say he ties himself to it sometimes, lest he slide off in a moment of weakness.’
Uctebri chuckled. ‘And your brother has many concubines but, I understand, no children. Not even bastards. Remarkable.’
‘He has all of his issue killed at birth,’ she said, ‘or so I have heard. Bastards have no standing, but even so he will not take the risk of one growing up to be used against him.’
‘And no lawful mate. No legitimate issue. A man concerned about his own longevity, should any child grow to manhood. You are his prisoner, but no more than he is his own. Ah, the foolishness of it all.’ His voice seemed to be drifting further away. ‘Still, you must see why he has, in the end, come to consider my proposal.’
‘And what is that?’ she asked. ‘What is your proposal? You may as well tell me. What am I able to do about it?’
‘I have told your brother I can allow him to live far beyond the few years normally allowed to your kinden. Perhaps even for ever? An immortal Emperor of the Wasp-kinden, for ever wise and loved by his subjects. He rather likes the idea, however much he doubts its possibility. He likes it enough to have me try.’
‘And should he ever believe he is immortal, I will die that very day,’ admitted Seda.
‘Ah, alas, your demise would come some moments sooner than his ascension.’ He was now speaking right in her ear. ‘My people understand blood, for blood is the darkness within our veins. Blood has power. Especially the blood of our kin. Sister and brother, close as close, Your Highness.’
She stiffened as she felt something sharp at her neck, like the razor edge of a tiny blade. She closed her eyes, clenching her fists, and willed it over soon.
There was the slightest arrow of pain, a tiny cut, and then the blade was gone, and for a short while Uctebri remained quiet. Then he said, ‘You have quite the sweetest blood I have tasted for some considerable time, great lady.’
‘My brother is mad to believe you,’ she spat at him. ‘You are mad to tempt him with it. After living in fear for eight years I am to be killed on this lunatic’s errand?’
‘Oh that is a shame, Your Highness, that you should believe it impossible.’ Uctebri whispered, still at her very shoulder. ‘You see, I have my own doubts about your brother’s patronage.’
With a start she felt the buckles over her wrists loosen, first one and then the other, and after that he was crouching at her ankles, still speaking. ‘I rather suspect that he would be a dangerous man to have around for ever. Or even for much longer. My concern, you see, is for my own kinden and their future, and I cannot say that it would be best served by the Emperor Alvdan. He strikes me as a man neither gracious nor grateful towards those who have helped him ascend to power.’
She was free of the chair now, so at any moment she could leap from it, but she stayed there, transfixed by his words. ‘Just what are you saying?’
‘Treason,’ he explained, and she knew he was standing right before the chair, as if a supplicant. ‘Or it would be if I were actually a subject of His Imperial Majesty. You may quibble that I am his prisoner, but ask yourself how long that state of affairs might persist if I did not wish it. No, rather the crown is currently serving me, in requisitioning some piece of desiderata that I have long coveted. What I am proposing is that, whilst I am quite capable of delivering what I promise, the crown of immortality would find a fitter home on another brow than your brother’s.’
She did not believe, for a moment, that he could do any such thing. He was a prisoner, and was bargaining for his life with these dreams of longevity. It could even be a trap set by her brother, save that he needed neither excuse nor pretext to have her killed. But possibly, just possibly, it meant that Uctebri the Sarcad represented both an ally and an opportunity.
‘I find your words favourable,’ she said, and extended her hand into the darkness. When he kissed it, she felt his sharp teeth scratch her skin.
I cannot believe this.
And yet her life had always been bound, not to her own world-view, but that of her brother. If his beliefs led him to the conclusion that she presented a threat, her life would be cut short on the instant. If his beliefs were that she was better off alive, then she would live another day, but only each day at a time. So why should what I believe matter, in this? When has it ever mattered?
After Uctebri was done with her she had considered his madness very carefully, while she sat before the glass and repaired her face. This was a whole gaping abyss of madness, like nothing she had ever experienced. Like all the other madness that had so far dominated her wretched life she had to understand it, though. She needed to speak to someone, and that could be no Wasp-kinden. It was not merely a matter of trust, but because her own people could not have advised her, in this. She was beyond all maps.
There was only one name, an old slave of her father’s, that she could call upon, so she did so.
He came almost timorously to her room: a lean, grey-skinned man with a long-skulled bald head, his cheeks lined and his head banded with pale, slightly shiny stripes. He always wore such an attitude of melancholy, as though the woes of all the world had come to him. When she was a child he used to make her laugh, when once she had still laughed.
‘May I enter, madam?’ he asked, his voice quavering. Seda could not suppress a smile at his hesitancy.
‘I sent for you, Gjegevey,’ she acknowledged, ‘so please come in.’
Her prison was a grand one. She had her own chambers decorated with whatever she could get, whatever she could cajole and plead for. There were threadbare tapestries blocking off the blank stone of the walls. She had some plants arranged before the narrow window, in Spider-kinden fashion. Two couches faced one another across a ragged rug of uncertain origin. She had two rooms, this one for receiving guests and, through a doorway guarded only by a hanging cloth, her bedroom. This was the extent of the Empire that Alvdan had left to his sister. His other siblings had fared worse.
The old Woodlouse-kinden stooped to enter her room. He was hunchbacked and inclined forwards, but still he was perilously tall. She knew that his people hailed from the north of the Empire, and that beyond the imperial borders there were said to be whole tribes of them living in giant forests, amongst trees that decayed for ever and yet never fell. She could not imagine there being any other of his kinden than him. How could such stilting awkwardness produce warriors, farmers or anything but vague philosophers?
‘You are reckoned a wise man, Gjegevey,’ she told him. He waved the compliment off dismissively.
‘You are, mmn, kind to say it, madam.’
‘You play the doddering old man, Gjegevey, and yet you have been an adviser to emperors since my father’s days in power. No slave could survive so, without wisdom.’
He smiled, thin-lipped, never dispelling the eternal sadness that his grey face lent him. ‘But there are fools and, mnah, fools, madam.’ He pursed his lips appreciatively as she poured him a beaker of wine. ‘I know my place, and it is this: that when there is an, mmn, idea in the mind of all my peers, my fellow advisers, that none wish to say, then I speak it. It may then be, mmm, dismantled and matters proceeded with. If I were to ever voice an opinion that none could destroy then no doubt I would be, hrm, killed on the spot. It is a delicate path for a man to walk, but if one’s balance is accomplished, then one may tread for many years upon it.’
‘Many years,’ she agreed, passing him the beaker. He sipped and nodded, and she asked, ‘How old are you, old man?’
‘I stopped counting at the age of, mnn, one hundred
and four, madam.’ The wistful smile came back at her wide-eyed expression. ‘We are a long-lived people — longer-lived, in any event, than your own. And I am not young, even for my kinden.’
‘I want to ask you something. I cannot think of anyone else who might even offer an opinion,’ Seda told him, inviting him to sit with a gesture. He perched precariously upon the couch across from her, still sipping at his wine. ‘A fair vintage this year,’ he murmured, but his eyes were watching her keenly from within their wrinkles.
‘On magic, Gjegevey,’ she said.
‘Mmn. Ah.’
‘An interesting response. Most would declare, without prompting, that there was no such thing, that it was a nonsense even to raise the matter.’
‘Is that what you wish me to say, madam?’
‘If I had wished such an opinion,’ she said, ‘I would not have called you over to speak to me. You are an educated man, and you were educated by your own folk before you ever fell into imperial hands. So tell me about magic.’
‘A curious matter, madam,’ he said. ‘I find myself, mmn, reluctant-’
‘Tell me nothing you would not wish repeated. But do not stay from telling me just because such a revelation might not be believed,’ she directed. ‘Magic, Gjegevey?’
‘Ah, well, my own people have uncommon views,’ he told her. ‘Most uncommon. I will, ahmn, share them with you, but I would not expect you to share them — if you understand — with me.’ At her impatient gesture he went on. ‘You did not know, I believe, that many of my kinden are Apt. We study, hrm, mechanics and the physical principles of the world, although in truth we build little, and that must be from wood in the main, metal being hard to come by in our homeland.’
‘I did not know that,’ she admitted. ‘And so, I would guess, that you cannot help me.’
‘Ah,’ he said, pedantic as a librarian. ‘Ah, but yet many of my kinden are not Apt and have no gift for machines, and yet follow, hrhm, other paths, the physical principles of the world and so forth and so on, that some might call magic. And so you see, we are in something of a unique position, my kinden. For we are not surging forwards into the, ahm, progress of the world of artifice, nor are we clinging grimly to the darkness of the Days of Lore. We are. in balance, I suppose one might say. And these two halves of our culture, they are not two halves at all, for each tries to share its insights with the other, and just occasionally, ahemhem, some gifted man or woman of our kind can understand the both. And so I can confirm to you, within the beliefs and the experiments of my kinden at least, that magic is very real.’
‘So why do we not believe in it?’ she asked. ‘If it is so real, prove it to me.’ Behind her challenging words, though, excitement was building.
‘Ah, but it is an interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be exceedingly unlikely, but you would cling to them rather than accept the, mmn, the chance that magic, the eternal inexplicable, might be the true agent, and if you were strong enough in yourself, unafraid, unthreatened, here in your own chambers, well perhaps there would be no magic worked at all. It is a subjective force, you see, whereas the physical laws of the artificers are objective. A gear-train will turn without faith, but magic may not. And so, when your people demand, mmn, proof, there is none, but when you have forgotten and dismissed it, then magic creeps back into the gaps where you do not look for it.’
She had a hundred more questions, a thousand, but she bit back on them. It would not do to trust this man too much. ‘Tell me, though, Gjegevey,’ she said, thinking hard. She must know no more than her brother would expect her to know, but her brother, if Maxin’s spies reported this conversation, would expect her to ask about Uctebri. ‘Are you aware that, as well as your magic, the Mosquito-kinden are real?’
He regarded her for a second solemnly and raised a hairless brow quizzically. ‘The Mosquito-kinden, madam? You must think me very, hmm, credulous.’ And yet as he spoke he nodded once, holding her eye.
So, he believes us overheard, though not overseen. ‘So some myths are really no more than myths,’ she said, feigning disappointment. She had heard that the Spider-kinden had some Art by which they could spin strands of web from their fingers, that they formed these into words and shapes of secret import, while all the time talking about mundane things. She wished she had some similar skill.
‘Alas so, madam,’ Gjegevey said. ‘However, let me alleviate your sorrow at this discovery. Shall I, mmm, show you a little harmless magic?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You can do this?’
‘I would not like to put your hopes too high, and it is some long time since I attempted any such thing. However. ’ He looked down at his hands, grey and long-fingered, and clasped them together, and when he pulled them apart. something came with them, something stretching and twisting between his fingers, flashing and flaring with colours.
It is a trick, she thought instantly. Some chemical or such. It was pretty enough, for a piece of foolery, and the old man was staring at her so very seriously. She opened her mouth to say something properly polite, and his voice came to her, very clear, without his lips moving or her ears hearing it, the words forming of their own accord in her mind.
The Mosquito your brother keeps, I know of him. Do not trust him. He is very old and wise.
She stared at his face, mouth open. Something lurched inside her. She had the horrible feeling that, in dealing with Uctebri the Sarcad, in coming to an agreement with him, she had stepped slightly out of the world she knew, into a world where things like this could happen.
He is wise, madam, but he is powerful. What he seeks to do is for himself, and not for your brother. Gjegevey’s tired old eyes suddenly flashed, throwing briefly into the air the cunning he kept hidden behind them. And you, Your Highness, may yet find a way to benefit from it. Only do not trust him. Do not trust him unless you have no other choice.
Nineteen
It was almost true that you could never get a decent spy placed in an Ant city. Ants were fanatically loyal or else they were outcasts with no civic standing. The best any spymaster could do was place a few men in the foreigners’ quarter or suborn a few slaves. Even the slaves of the Ants tended to acquire something of their masters’ civic pride, though. It seemed incredible to Thalric but, after a generation or so, those born into such captivity seemed to believe that a slave in their city was better than a freeman elsewhere.
He had made good time along the coast to Vek, paying a Collegium sailing master over the odds to catch the wind night and day and thus get him there by the second dawn, so that the rising sun glittered against the great grey seawall that sheltered Vek Anchorage as he arrived. He saw the spidery shapes of trebuchets and ballistae positioned upon it, while reports from the delegation had mentioned that there were fire-projectors built into the wall itself.
Behind the sea-wall, his boat was towed the length of the stone-lined canal until it reached the city proper. Docked, and his transport paid for, Thalric made his way through the subdued streets of the foreigners’ quarter, following the map he had memorized a tenday earlier. The imperial delegation had made a favourable impression on the Vekken Royal Court, he understood, and a two-storey building had been cleared of a consortium of Beetle importers and assigned for their use. He saw it ahead of him now, the typically spare Ant architecture of flat roof, unadorned walls and small, defensible windows, with a pair of Wasp soldiers standing guard outside. They crossed lances before him, but they could see his race and thus it was just a formality.
‘Captain Thalric to see Captain Daklan,’ he announced, and they let him through. His name would be familiar, and on being relayed would be translated as Major Thalric of the Rekef.
Inside, they had slaves offer him fruit and some brackish local wine. He barely had time to taste either before they came for him.
Capt
ain Daklan of the army, who was also Major Daklan of the Rekef Outlander, was a short, broad-shouldered man a few years Thalric’s junior. His dark hair was receding and he had a lined face and a mobile mouth that made him look humorous and easygoing, which was in fact anything but the case. He had entered with two others, a taller Wasp in a uniform tunic who had a writing tablet crooked in his arm, and a strange-looking woman. She must have been close to Thalric’s age, and she was a halfbreed, her dark skin swirled in strange patterns of grey and white like water-damaged cloth. The effect was disturbing and intriguing at once.
‘Major Thalric,’ Daklan said, giving him a cursory salute. ‘How is Collegium?’
‘Owed a beating,’ Thalric said, heartfelt. A slave came in with more wine, some bread and honey, and he topped up his bowl again. ‘How do we stand here, Major?’
‘Well enough. I’ve heard of some of your own exploits, Thalric,’ Daklan said. ‘Helleron was a botch, wasn’t it?’
Thalric frowned at him, caught with a slice of bread halfway to his mouth. ‘Are you authorized to question me about my past operations, Major Daklan?’
Daklan gave him a narrow look. ‘Just interested. Word spreads.’
‘Then it is your job to stop it doing so, not spread it further,’ Thalric said. ‘We have enough to concern us here in Vek.’ His orders had put him at the head of this operation, but Daklan was obviously an officer who chafed under anyone else’s control. Thalric took a chair and sat down, taking his time to finish the bread, smearing it thickly with honey, making Daklan wait. The scribe with the tablet remained impassive but the woman looked very slightly amused at the deliberate delay. Daklan meanwhile shuffled from one foot to the other.
‘Major Thalric-’
Thalric, mouth still half-full, held up a hand. ‘This honey is very good. Where does it come from?’ he asked the halfbreed woman, still chewing.
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