‘But how can she be here? How can you . . .?’ Che walked forward to stand before the other woman. ‘Helma, can you hear me?’
The eyes swivelled to follow her, and abruptly Helma Bartrer’s face assumed an unexpected expression: pure spite. ‘Oh, I hear you, Maker,’ she acknowledged. ‘The master has sent me to bring you to his table.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Che insisted. ‘Why are you here? How did you even get here?’
‘By hard work, by guessing, by faith in my master,’ Bartrer hissed. ‘By knowing my place and staying true to our betters.’
‘The Moth-kinden?’
‘Do you deny it now that you are here?’ Barter challenged her.
‘She’s Arcanum,’ Thalric guessed, speaking of the Moth intelligence service. ‘She has been all this time.’
‘More than that.’ Seda spoke from right beside him. ‘Your people were slaves once, Maker. Small wonder, then, if there’s some remnant cult who want those days back. Never underestimate how much some people want to be led.’
Helma Bartrer stared at the Empress. ‘Your kinden were slaves, too, Wasp girl, and they still are. It’s just that their taste in masters has deteriorated.’
‘Wait, you came all this way . . . how could you even know this was going to happen?’ Che demanded of her.
‘Oh, I hoped.’ Again that ugly look. ‘Everything to do with the Moths, I tried to associate myself with. We have been faithful, generation on generation, waiting for this day when we could present ourselves to our masters. Perhaps all but I had given up any hope. But you!’ And the sudden venom was startling. ‘You had it all given to you, by mere chance! You’ve become something special, something that he’s interested in . . . and how is that just, that you could blunder into such a thing when I’ve been loyal in my heart all my life?’ She would have gone on but something stayed her, a reprimand audible to her only snapping her head back. ‘Come with me,’ she muttered, and hurried off into the darkness, with that reflected light never quite leaving her, making the woman a beacon for them to navigate by.
It lit up nothing else, though, so they had arrived before they realized it. When the green-white lanterns sprang up around them, they all froze. Thalric felt meanly glad to see the same startled, fearful look on Che’s and Maure’s faces as he knew must have appeared on his own.
‘Please be seated,’ Helma Bartrer declared flatly.
There was a table there, its top a single slab of black-varnished wood, its edges uneven and ragged with the contours of the tree it had been hacked from. The chairs were little better, just slats and wands of wood twisted and grown together as though their maker, in striving to ape the natural, had finished up with something utterly unearthly. The walls pressed in on all sides, allowing barely room to drag the chairs back. Thalric could see them only dimly and, when he brushed one with his elbow, he felt angled metal there, and he shivered without quite knowing why.
It did not help that those corpse-light lanterns lacked sconces: just fitful, pallid flames guttering in the air.
At the head of the table, he saw one seat they were plainly not being invited to sit in. It was more a throne, intricately carved with intertwining briars, beetles and grubs, centipedes and woodlice and all things associated with decay, while its arms resembled the crooked claws of a mantis. As if that was not grand enough for their host, suspended behind it was the complete, hollow exoskeleton of just such a beast, battle-scarred and one-eyed, and long enough dead for the light to lend it a translucent glow.
Barbaric trophies, Thalric decided, and the gaudy ostentation gave him back some of his lost control, because here, at least, was a human thing, if only a desire to show off. Whatever Argastos now was, this was a part of him Thalric could relate to. He had seen similar trophies even in the possession of Imperial officers, and they had been mere bragging boasts of their owner’s self-importance.
Che’s hand found his arm and squeezed it slightly, and then she was sitting down, calmly and confidently, the first of them to do so. Seda followed suit a second behind, choosing a seat across the table from her, with Tisamon inevitably taking station at her shoulder. With that, there was nothing else but for Tynisa to do likewise, but Thalric was cursed if he was going to hover on his feet like a house-slave. Maure had already slipped in beside Che, and so he ended up at the end of the table facing that throne.
Their host arrived, just not all at once. Thalric had the best view of its progress, which he regretted. There was a scuttling and a massing within the intricate carving of the throne, and the things previously only represented there were now springing from the wood, a dusty swarm of empty shells, wing-cases, sightless eyes and hollow mandibles, the tiny bloodless cadavers of a thousand crawling things amalgamating and writhing, and growing ever greater until they had transformed into the slouching shape of a seated man. Thalric just stared, tightly motionless but unable to tear his eyes from the sight.
Then the scuttling dead things began disintegrating, a shedding rain of chitin flakes and segments drifting away, and revealed was Argastos, clad in his mail, with his easy, empty smile and those blank white eyes.
From somewhere inside him, a part of Thalric rose up and gave himself a slap, because he had been staring like some superstitious Commonwealer peasant at this show. And it was a show. What was the point of this, if not to play to the crowd? We’ve seen him pop in and out like a sergeant in a brothel. Why the grand entrance, if not to awe the newcomers? And with that thought he managed to muster a reasonable head of contempt sufficient to take the edge off his fear. Well, maybe you can still be taken down a step, Argastos.
There was a bowl in front of him. He assured himself it had always been there. In this bad light, who knew? Now Helma Bartrer, Mistress of the Great College, was fetching some sort of cauldron, and Thalric realized that, of all things, she was about to serve them.
But, of course, that’s her place in Argastos’s world.
What she decanted into his bowl looked, in the unhealthy light, like greasy grey dishwater tinted with rot.
‘You have no idea,’ Argastos stated, ‘how long I have been waiting for you. Long enough that I ceased searching the future for some hope of deliverance, centuries ago.’
Che and Seda exchanged glances and the Beetle inquired, ‘And who did you think you were waiting for?’
The Moth smiled easily. He possessed the sort of confident, self-satisfied manner and elegant good looks that made Thalric’s palms itch. ‘You, exactly you. A new kind of magician, not tied to the old and yet with power, true power. I see the mark of the old Masters on the two of you, clear as day, and yet just look at you! Are you Skryres of my kinden? Are you Manipuli of the Spiders or Mosquito Sarcads? You are not.’
He did not sound damning about that, either. Thalric might have expected contempt, but Argastos was playing a deeper game.
‘Beetles, Wasps, Ants – the inheritors of the world,’ the Moth continued admiringly. ‘Look at you. Look at him, a typical specimen.’ He jabbed his finger at Thalric himself, who twitched in response, and had to press his hands down against the table to keep his Art in check.
‘Not a grain of magic in him,’ Argastos went on, ‘and yet his kind, your kin – the Apt – are the great masters of today, swarming over the earth, lords and ladies of the new world. Don’t think I have not witnessed it, even locked away in here. Between then and now, I have had visitors whose minds have shown me all.’
There’s a pleasant thought, Thalric reflected unhappily, as he cast a glance around at the oppressively confining walls. They only rose to around head-height, with the cave-like ceiling arching high above, and they seemed . . . less than solid, as though there were gaps and holes in them, or shapes . . . His skin crawled.
‘You don’t resent us for taking away the world you knew, then?’ Seda asked the Moth haughtily. ‘Or the diminishing of your people?’
‘You overestimate how much I care about my kinden,’ Argastos replied sharply,
making Helma Bartrer twitch. ‘I owe them a great deal, yes indeed, and it will be paid back, every drop. I do not begrudge you, Empress of the Wasps. Your kind and her kind, all the Apt, you have built well. You have built more than we ever did, perhaps. And, believe me, I am the only man in the world who can say this, for I remember my own time clearly – no false nostalgia for me. I am a thousand years of watching the world turn, and everything you have built is built on my triumphs. If not for me, there would be nothing but the Worm.’
‘That’s a grand claim,’ Che observed cautiously.
‘Is it?’ Argastos still sounded very pleasant, very well-mannered, but Thalric kept hearing something hollow resonating in the man’s words, some agenda prowling behind them as if trying to fight its way clear. He tried to catch Maure’s eye, in the hope that the woman had some insight, but the halfbreed was staring down at her bowl and keeping her eyes well away from Argastos.
‘That was their sole intent, to cover the world with their kind, to leave nothing else under the sun or beneath the earth but themselves – not even their slaves once they had no more use for them,’ Argastos explained. ‘The long wars of the Inapt kinden led them to that. In the end they could not feel safe while any other kinden shared their world. And I stopped them. I was War Master of the great host, I won the battles, I drove them back into their holes. And, when the time came, it was I who made the decision to rid the world of them entirely, no matter the cost, so that we could have a future secure from their resurgence.’
The hard tone creeping into that rich voice was exactly what Thalric had been expecting.
‘Are we supposed to applaud you?’ Seda enquired.
‘Why not? Is what I accomplished to be considered nothing? To have been the saviour of the whole world? Who else could say that, before or after me? You must see this – especially you two, the magician-queens of this latter age. You must understand me. I have brought you here so that you can know me.’
‘You did not bring us here,’ Che said, almost half-heartedly. Seda was merely looking thoughtful.
‘I have brought you here,’ Argastos repeated, ‘and I appeal to you both. To the Beetle, for justice; to the Wasp, for revenge. Is it just that I should be trapped here for all eternity, become a martyr to my own life’s work? Should I not plot my vengeance?’
And something must have happened to the light, then, though it hardly seemed brighter, because now Thalric could see the walls around them in detail, and saw that they were not walls at all, and that the maze had not been a maze. The great mantis shell strung behind Argastos’s throne was only one trophy amongst hundreds.
Armour, ranks and ranks of it, stretching back into the gloom on every side, hanging empty and hollow like the insect carapace suspended above. Thalric’s eyes flicked from suit to suit. The vast majority of it was Mantis-kinden work, that ornate and intricately worked mail and plate that collectors paid ridiculous sums for, but here was a collection that all Helleron would have beggared itself to acquire, each suit unique, yet each following the same aesthetic. How many Mantis dreams lie buried here? And his eyes moved on from helm to faceless helm, over glittering gold, enamel in green and black, spines and blades and elegantly shaped curves, that no smith now living could perhaps have wrought.
And there was more, alongside that antique host. He saw plenty in amongst them that seemed to be relics of a more recent time: the same chitin and leather as had been worn by the Nethyen still living outside, back where the world was at least nominally sane. They hung from their stands right alongside their elder cousins and, if he had been minded, he could have traced the evolution: the decline of Mantis culture from its glory days to the remnants of the present.
Black and gold caught his eye, and he realized that Argastos had welcomed more visitors than just the locals.
There was the dark chainmail of Sarnesh Ants, too, a variety of designs as though this was some armourer’s museum. He saw Collegiate robes draped slack and empty, now they were gutted of their Beetle owner, and aviator’s canvas, helm and goggles and all. And of course there were the Wasps, for the Seventh Army had been this way in recent memory. A handful of the Light Airborne, some heavier infantry plate, the light mail they had distributed to Imperial pilots during the last war, so that he thought of that downed airship they had taken refuge in.
Che gave a shuddering breath, and he spotted it just as she did. Here was a Collegiate Company soldier’s armour built for a massive frame, and around it the others: the loose, discarded gear of Seda’s Pioneers. The Empress’s eyes were fixed on a ragged old robe, scarcely worthy of a stand of its own.
‘I have had many visitors over the years,’ Argastos intoned. ‘They are no more than memories now, my trophies. But you! You are special. You have come to bring me my revenge, the two of you. Such strength you possess, and yet so little idea how to use it, and here I am, with a millennium’s experience, just waiting for that burst of power to set me free.’
He was standing now, leaning forward over the table.
‘And, believe me, when I am free the world shall know it. Between us, we three shall shake it to its foundations. We shall cast down my kin, and right all wrongs, and all things that displease us shall be banished from this world, even as the Worm was. No mercy! You, the inheritors of the old days, you shall be my brides, my lovers, and we shall use your power to remake the world in our image.’
And surely Che or Seda were bound to laugh at him then, or at least slap him down somehow, and yet the two of them seemed to be paying Argastos far too much heed. And so Thalric decided to play to his own strengths and puncture the man’s expanding self-esteem.
‘Revenge on the Moths? A bit late, no? And if anything you Inapt were capable of could achieve anything, why wouldn’t they have done it already? It’s not for want of trying that they’re next to extinct.’
He succeeded in getting Argastos’s attention then, which was the most he could claim. The Moth was suddenly staring at him as though one of the chairs had piped up of its own accord. And . . .
With a single crash, in perfect unison, every suit of armour, every set of garments there had taken a step forward, raising dust from the floor which had gone undisturbed since the start of time, and they were now all occupied, every one. Thalric froze in place, his further words dying inside his mouth. A grey face in every helm, curdled eyes staring out at him. Lean, sharp Mantis faces, the brown of Beetles’ skins now charred to coal, the brother-sister likenesses of Ants and the death-pallor of his own kinden, and all staring out at him with expressions of such hopeless, terrifying misery that it shook him, it shook everything he called his own.
He met the gaze of the nearest Wasp, a man in the armour of the Airborne, and saw the man’s lips moving over and over: Help me, help me, help me . . .
And Thalric felt his innards turn to water, a fear twisting inside him that was as old as his kinden, as old as the darkness itself, and he said no more.
Che could not bring herself to look at Amnon’s armour, not now that he would be occupying it once again. Trapped here like all of them, so many, I had not thought . . . Was this what the ancient Skryres had intended, when they had devised this place? That it should be a pitcher plant trap for the ghosts of all who came here during the years to come?
She decided that they had. She knew that much at least about the Moth-kinden. And she could even appreciate why, for below her, directly below her, was the Great Seal, the capstone of Argastos’s grand plan, which kept the Worm trapped in whatever half-world had been curled about it. Argastos had wrought it, using all the might of the Inapt, and then his own people had doomed him to guard it forever, and she did not know whether that was justice or not. His followers had come, too, in their loyal, unthinking ranks, his Mantis war band taking their place for all eternity at their master’s side, likewise everyone else who had been drawn here, and died here . . .
She looked at Maure, and found the woman staring out over that dead host, the tears runn
ing down her face, and she understood. Not just cast-off shells, not just left-over cocoons where the real occupant had fled. Like Argastos himself, these were the true minds and essences of the dead.
And his fate was not just. He was right about that. But surely he was part of this injustice, the disease and not the remedy.
But he was staring at her and at Seda, and his attention, his strength of personality, was all around her, and she found she could not venture to speak.
‘Your slave thinks I am deluded,’ he said, in almost a whisper. It was not clear to which of them he was attributing Thalric’s servitude. ‘But I am no fool, and I know the world has moved on. I have my army here, my legion of the undying, but what would that count for against the wide Apt world?’ He really did have a very compelling smile. ‘But I will not have to rely on anything so antiquated. You yourselves have shown me that.’ And he nodded companionably at Seda, who was staring at him with the same unwilling fixation as Che herself. ‘For I will have myself an Empire,’ Argastos breathed. ‘And I will have a city of the Apt to serve my will. And I do not need to understand it, so long as my slaves know their trades – and so long as I have you as my consorts.’
Che tried to open her mouth to respond, but there was an invisible hand laid on her that stopped her words, censoring her very thoughts. She reached out for her power, but Argastos stood firmly between her will and her ability. She was stronger than him, she knew, for she had been crowned in Khanaphes, and Seda too. But they were in Argastos’s realm now, and he had been working on them, unthought-of and unsuspected, ever since they had come there.
And he really did have a presence about him, a strong, smooth confidence. She found herself staring into his face, marking those elegant Moth lines. Had Achaeos ever looked like that? She did not think so. And Thalric? Thalric was some ugly Apt creature, a servant, a slave. Not like us. For of course the world was divided into Apt and Inapt for a reason, and she should simply be grateful that she had somehow crossed onto the right side.
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