Here it comes, Che thought, for the Mantis had got the measure of her opponent now and was gathering herself, the exploratory feints becoming more and more aggressive, her attacks fiercer and fiercer, and from more angles, stepping left and right to make her opponent move.
Tynisa moved. Abruptly she was dodging sideways to match the Mantis, and it was like a crippled beggar suddenly taking to his heels to avoid the guard. The limp, the stiffness, all were gone without trace, and Tynisa’s old grace was back with her, born of her varied heritage and her long practice, of her own perfect affinity with the fight. The Mantis fell back, trying to open some space in which to adjust, but Tynisa flowed with her, sword dancing, clattering and scraping as it stooped and clashed with the other woman’s blade.
What the others perceived, Che could not know, but her eyes saw the trick, the Weaponsmaster’s discipline that Tynisa drew on. It was almost as if her rapier was fixed in the air, moving of its own accord and lending its wielder the strength to move with it. The sword led and Tynisa followed, an equal partnership of its strength and her direction. If she let go of the hilt, Che felt that her sister would collapse like a puppet.
The Mantis woman hissed in fury and tried to reclaim the initiative, losing out to her emotions for only a moment: that this halfbreed, this abomination and trickster, was making a mockery of her people’s ways. In that moment Tynisa had shrugged past her guard, rapier point dipping past the Mantis’s quillons to gash her hand, to slice a thin line of red up her arm, to come to rest at the hollow of her throat. Now they were still again, just as they had started. For a long moment nobody spoke, nobody moved.
‘Finish it,’ the Mantis said quite calmly, as though the blade was pressed at someone else’s neck.
‘Cut your own throat, if you want,’ Tynisa answered carelessly, and abruptly she stepped back, sword lowering, and turned her back on her opponent. The access to speed and poise that had possessed her drained away, and it was plain that her next few steps pained her. The sword had done its work, and now abandoned her to the aftermath.
‘If you claim that badge, you claim our ways!’ the Mantis shouted at her retreating back.
‘I have lived by Mantis ways,’ Tynisa said flatly, not looking at her. ‘I have seen where they lead and I am amazed there are any of your kinden left alive. Save that I know that it is because nobody can live up to those iron rules you set yourselves. It is only by constant, concealed failures, day by day, that the Mantis-kinden can survive at all. I know this from my father and I know this from myself. And yet the badge is still with me, as is the sword, and I am worthy of both. Can you deny that?’ At last she turned, inviting challenge.
The Mantis woman bared her teeth and braced herself, twice seeming on the very point of leaping at Tynisa and recommencing the duel. At the last, though, she could not.
‘Che, we go into the wood tomorrow?’ Tynisa asked.
‘That’s my plan.’ Che did not even bother with the usual platitudes of, You don’t have to go with me. ‘The Sarnesh want to send soldiers in as well, so as to help the Etheryen counter the Wasps. It’ll make sense to travel with them at first, but we’ll need to go faster, and deeper, soon enough.’
‘Then tell them we are coming. Tell them a Weaponsmaster is coming. And tell them that all the rest, my blood, my face, none of it matters if I have earned this badge.’ And Tynisa stared at the Mantis woman until she had retreated back into the woods, looking baffled and angry but unable to deny it.
Eight
His name was Esmail. His name was Ostrec. He had two faces and two lives, one lurking invisible beneath the other, like a fish hanging in dark waters with its eyes fixed on the surface.
The waters ran deeper still, for that outer shell of Ostrec was itself a many-layered thing. Lieutenant Ostrec of the Quartermasters Corps: ambitious young officer, pushy, arrogant, competitive, all the virtues the Wasps so loved. No doubt his outmanoeuvred or fallen rivals had all wondered what his secret was. It was that behind the outer face of Lieutenant Ostrec lurked Major Ostrec of the Rekef, hunter of traitors. He had been on close terms with great men until recently, had Major Ostrec, but then there had been a culling amongst those grandees of the secret police, a sudden dying off of the Rekef’s leadership to isolate their General Brugan. His plots to control the Empress had gone awry, Brugan’s allies were dead, and the Rekef itself was lessened. And Ostrec? Major Ostrec had seamlessly transferred his loyalty to the Empress, and nobody in the know had been much surprised. Who would not have done so, under the circumstances?
Now he was Major Ostrec of the Red Watch, a company of the elite created by the Empress herself. Most assumed that its members were all ex-Rekef spies and killers, or similar terrors, but there was a stranger secret at the heart of it as the man behind Ostrec’s face knew only too well.
He knew the Empress was Inapt and a magician. She had hunted out Wasp-kinden with some faint touch of the old days in them — from mixed blood or some far-distant ancestor of power. These Wasps she had made her own, bound them to her by blood and named them her Red Watch. Each had a mere drop of magic in them, but together they fed their mistress by their deeds. Seda had come late to her power, by the slow decline of magic, but she was reinventing lost traditions at a frightening rate. She understood that darkness and fear and pain were not just tools of the arcane, they were weapons of statecraft.
So she had cast an eye over Ostrec, the duplicitous, and seen that spark strong within him, and made him hers, and never realized that here was a creature cunning enough to hide his true nature from her. She had never realized that Ostrec, the Quartermaster lieutenant and Rekef major, had been dead for tendays, and that the man she had taken into her closest circle was a spy and a killer of a very different kind.
His name was Ostrec. His name was Esmail. He was one of the very few left of his kinden, the Assassin Bugs who had fought and lost an ancient war against the Moth-kinden in ages forgotten to Apt history. He had been sent to the Empire by Moths of Tharn, but it was plain to him that those Tharen sages who had briefed him had lost out to bolder spirits, for Tharn was allied with the Empire now. He would be getting no further instructions.
They had briefed him to investigate the Empress, to find out what she was. More, they had briefed him to kill her.
He would be able to manufacture the opportunity, he knew, for Ostrec was trusted by the Empress. If he had been unconcerned with his own survival, then he could have done it already, but he had left family behind near Tharn, and he was not quite ready yet for the ultimate sacrifice.
More, he was not sure that he would do it, even if he could be sure to walk away from the deed. The frightening revelation was that the Empress was Inapt, and held a great deal of magical power, and if she was also capricious and wicked and ruthless, so what? These were not solely Wasp virtues, after all, and could be claimed by many of the great magicians of old. Looking on Seda, Esmail was only struck by how much the current crop had lost of their inheritance. For her part, she was young and vital and strong, and she did not hesitate to use her power. She had bound Mantis-kinden to her, destroyed her rivals and roused an Empire to war, and all this from being a timid girl living in the shadow of her brother’s displeasure.
She claimed that she would bring back the old days. Esmail, whose heritage and training were sunk deep in those lost times, reckoned that, if anyone could do it, Seda could.
He was having a difficult time working out where his true loyalties should lie, and in the meantime the Empress was not standing still. Here they were at the gates of the Mantis dream, and tomorrow the Wasps would march in to support their Nethyen allies, and Seda would march along with them to secure. .
He was not sure what, for she did not confide in anyone save the crooked Woodlouse-kinden Gjegevey. Power would be involved, though, that seemed beyond doubt. Something buried in the Mantis wood was calling to her. The thought of Seda with yet more power in her hands filled him with fear, and yet quickened his bloo
d. What might she not do? What might she not bring back from those dead ages?
He would go with her into the trees tomorrow, he knew. He would go, and her Mantis bodyguards, and that creature Tisamon, which Esmail knew was no living man — another feat from the old stories that Seda had somehow recreated! With them would go the Empire’s best, the most skilled Pioneers that General Roder could lay his hands on. Behind them would come the scouts and trackers and Light Airborne of the Eighth Army, those soldiers best suited to fighting in such a dark and twisted place.
I will bring it all back, she had said, and the prospect of killing her was receding, day by day. Even though she did not really know him, he was becoming her creature every bit as much as Tisamon was.
She will destroy us all, he warned himself, yet there was much of him that could not make himself regret it.
When Seda emerged from her tent, General Roder was waiting for her and had been for some time. She could read a great deal in his half-crippled face about just how well that sat with him.
She noticed his eyes register Tisamon, and saw him master an instinctual flinch away — such good instincts he had. Still, here he was, so plainly something important was gnawing at the general — or at least something that he considered important.
‘Your Imperial Majesty.’
‘Ah, General.’ She favoured him with a smile. ‘I hope you are not here hoping to dissuade me from my jaunt?’ He had certainly tried to argue against her entering the Mantis wood, with fistfuls of reasons that to the Apt were entirely logical and persuasive. If that was his tune still this morning she would not be pleased, but she sensed something else had sunk its jaws into him.
‘I have received word from the Second Army, Majesty,’ Roder reported, holding out a scroll.
She waved it away. It would be in some Apt code, illegible to her even if she had been taught the cipher. But then, as Empress, she had people to read things for her. In such a fashion her Inapt nature went undiscovered even in the heart of the Empire. ‘Tell me,’ she instructed.
‘General Tynan informs me he is on the move, as per orders. The Second has resumed its march on Collegium.’
She had not doubted it. Tynan was a solid, reliable officer, experienced enough to cope with his recent reversals against the Beetles. Nobody ever said that conquering Collegium would be easy. A lie: many back in Capitas had claimed the Beetles would fall before Tynan as swiftly as their kin in Helleron had capitulated, but they were fools who did not realize that a warrior spirit was not the sole route to determined resistance. The Beetles were tough and ingenious and, even though Seda could no longer understand all their clever Apt ways, she was well aware that they could still throw myriad problems at General Tynan’s feet. His war would be fought by artificers just as much as by soldiers.
‘He. .’ A moment’s hesitation while Roder considered the words of a fellow general which had been meant only for him. ‘He is concerned about his air strength against the Beetles. He has a great deal of respect for their pilots and machines.’ Had Tynan’s actual words expressed something stronger, something approaching criticism? No matter: Seda had looked into Tynan’s face and soul. He would follow orders.
‘The issue is in hand, General,’ she told Roder, feeling a small degree of amusement that this part of Tynan’s fight — a key element of the Second’s strategy of which even Tynan was ignorant for now — was something that she could understand.
Still Roder stood there with the burden of something unsaid weighing him down. Seda sighed, feeling the pressure of her station and majesty: how to inspire awe in your underlings without all these awkward pauses while they searched their own words for treason? ‘Just speak, General. The forest awaits me.’
The general nodded. ‘It is a matter concerning the Second, Majesty.’ His gaze flicked to Tisamon, and then back to her. She found it remarkable that the eye in the paralysed half of his face was perhaps his most expressive feature now. ‘Tynan has the Spiders as his allies.’
Ah, there we are. ‘General, we are confident in our strategies and in those we send to war,’ she told him. ‘You should concern yourself with your own campaign.’ And she began to walk away.
‘No, Majesty!’ and he had put out a hand to physically stop her, whereupon Tisamon’s gauntlet blade was at his throat, and it was only because Seda had a swift enough mind to rein her bodyguard in that she was not in need of a new general there and then.
‘Explain yourself,’ she snapped, staring at his frozen, outstretched hand. Perhaps I do need a new general, after all. She had thought she had the measure of Roder’s rebellious thoughts and insecurities, but this was new.
‘Your Imperial Majesty,’ Roder said carefully, the razor line of steel still touching his neck, ‘do not trust the Spider-kinden. They cannot be trusted.’ His eyes entreated her, afire with the need to communicate. ‘I fought them in the last war, barely three years ago. They were our enemies then and they are our enemies now — save that they have a score to settle with Collegium. They were the Beetles’ allies once, remember! When Tynan and his Second are at their most extended, when the fight balances on a knife-edge, they will betray him for the Beetles again. Or else, when he has won, his men depleted whilst the Spiders hold back, they will destroy him and claim the spoils that are ours. Majesty, Tynan has left a chain of such conquests in his wake — Tark, Merro, Kes — and they are all gone over to the Spiderlands, not to the Empire.’
Seda stared into that half-mask face. What does he gain from this? This is because the Spiders poisoned him, is it? He hates them that much? Where has this come from?
‘Majesty,’ Roder said again, and it was not the soldier that now spoke, but the plain man beneath. ‘Heed me on this, I beg you. They are no fit allies for us, and Tynan is in danger every moment he marches alongside them. Ask him!’ Incredibly, he was pointing at Tisamon, driven to calling upon the least likely aid in his attempt to persuade her. ‘Ask your other bodyguards. Ask the Nethyen! The Mantids have known forever what the Eighth found out in the last war. I have seen my men poisoned and trapped, seduced from their duty, turned against their superiors. I have fought a war against them, and there is nothing of the soldier in them, no honour, no heart, just masks and more masks!’ He was baring his soul now, and the bitter venom in there startled her. She recalled how he had asked to be given the southern front, before the Empire had allied itself with the Spiderlands Aristoi. And that would have gone even more poorly than I thought, and we would even now be fighting around Solarno rather than most of the way to Collegium. And yet, and yet. .
The Spiders were an old Inapt power, and they had held onto that power when most of their peers from the Days of Lore had fallen into ruin. They controlled vast territories, cities of the Apt and the Inapt both, and just like Seda herself they made use of all the artificers’ machines without needing to understand them. A jolt of uncertainty shot through her. What have I overlooked? Overconfidence was always the scourge of rulers. Of course, the Spiders are clever — they have been playing for centuries the game I have invented for myself. So what is the true plan that the Aldanrael have hatched? Is Roder right?
She could not say, and that gaping chasm in her knowledge came close to frightening her. But Roder was right in one thing: she could not be certain of the Spider-kinden as allies. They were treacherous, and she must remember that, and take steps to protect the Empire from them should they turn.
‘General Roder,’ she began, and her very tone was enough to retract Tisamon’s blade and to dispel the tension that their little confrontation had been spreading throughout the camp. ‘You are a good and loyal servant of the Empire,’ she continued, ‘and I hear your words. Our allies in the Spiderlands have been true to us so far, but there will come a time when we will not need them, or they will not need us. It is well to be watchful, and perhaps Tynan is indeed too trusting.’
She saw him relax, and at last glimpsed the spark of motive there. Yes, he hated the Spiders for the injurie
s of the last war — both to him and to his army — but there was more. His concern was for the Empire and for its greater war. True, if Tynan fell, then Roder would find himself caught between Sarn and the Collegiates, but it was more than that. Roder wanted the Empire to win. She realized, then, how close she had been to turning him away, how her own exalted station, her personal ambitions, could have compromised the war. And they will do so, still, for I will brook no barriers, but I am Empress — as well as heiress to the Days of Lore. I must remember my people. She had a hollow, unhappy feeling that this would be harder and harder to achieve, in the days to come. I will be Empress and magician-queen both. I will rule as the Spiders rule. And if the Spiders challenge me, then. .
‘Captain Vrakir,’ she snapped, and one of her Red Watch came rushing over to do her bidding. He had been listed to accompany her into the forest, but now she had another task for him. ‘Commandeer an orthopter and fly to join the Second,’ she told him. ‘I will have sealed orders prepared for you. You are to act as adviser to General Tynan, with my full authority. Ostrec alone will suffice to represent the Red Watch in my escort.’
Vrakir saluted. He was a serious, intelligent man, formerly a lieutenant in the Fourth Army, one of the survivors of the Felyal massacre early in the last war. More, he was gifted: some great-grandparent had adulterated the Wasp blood within him, and she knew he had proved deficient with machines and maps, a poor representative of the Apt. He was no magician, of course — none of her Red Watch could have mastered the simplest magic — but he made a good vessel. There was just enough vestigial affinity within him that she could work through him, speak to him, even see through his eyes if she used all her strength. It would be like trying to force herself through the tiny holes of a sieve, but that was better than the solid wall presented by most Wasps.
‘I will have orders drawn up by the time you are ready to leave,’ she told him and, as Vrakir ran off, she turned her attention back to Roder. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘show me my escorts, your picked men.’
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