The Mantis was Shonaen, and while the Moth talked she lit sticks of sickly-smelling incense and inhaled the smoke until her pupils were no more than dots. If she had ever been the death-bringer of her people’s reputation, the mantle had sloughed off her long ago.
The Moth, though; when she spoke of magic, Uctebri felt something chime within himself. It made him remember how little his people had settled for, in hiding, in defeat. It made him want more.
She gave her name as Julaea, daughter of one Adguros of Tharn who had died an outcast. He had sought to rally his people to greatness, or so said Julaea. They had turned their backs on him, lacking his vision and courage. Now she was going to fulfil his dreams.
“The dreams of a dead magician are dangerous things to play with,” Uctebri told her with a think smile, but her words had their hooks in him nonetheless. And she had given him her name, which Moths were loath to do. That did more than the crossbow to keep him at their fire.
“It’s time we took it back,” she said simply, and laughed at his expression. “It’s time for a new age of magic, Mosquito-kinden. You don’t think so?”
“I have seen the greatest kingdom of magic dismantled by these machine-handed Wasps,” Uctebri said quietly. “Centuries of lore put to the torch, traditions a thousand years old ground under their boots. I think an age of magicians has never been so far off. Sometimes I think we dreamt all our great days.”
Julaea’s smile was sharp as knives. “Old Bloodsucker, you haven’t seen what I have. You think this is war, this song of slaves and slaughter? This is nothing to what the Wasps will bring. I have dreamt whole cities ablaze beneath a rain of fire. I have seen darts that pierce the strongest mail and reap soldiers like corn.”
“What joyous visions,” murmured Uctebri.
“Apt cities, Apt soldiers,” Julaea told him. “All the artificer kinden will turn on one another and tear down everything they’ve built. It will be a new age of darkness, and the darkness was always ours, Old Bloodsucker. The darkness belongs to Moths and Mosquitos and Mantids.”
Uctebri felt his old cynicism stir. “Prophecy,” he said sourly. “If it could help us, then the Apt would never have thrown off your people’s chains all those years ago. Since when has any magician been able to look into their future?”
“Since she was born to one,” said Julaea, daughter of Adguros. “My father led a raid on the Beetle mines outside Helleron. They caught him; they chained him underground with their engines and their wheels. A year he was there, in the smoke and the scent of burning oil. When he came out under the sky he was magician no more; he had become a thing like they were, who understood the cogs and the pistons.” She pronounced the Apt words carefully, learnt by rote. “He came to Tharn and tried to show them how to destroy the Beetle machines but they would not listen to him. They would not trust him and they could not understand. But later I sat at his knee and listened; I dreamt of the machine future and its destruction. There is just enough of Adguros in me that I would master the world of the Apt.”
“I fear you,” Uctebri whispered, but he heard the longing in his own voice.
“You are right to,” she told him. “I will overthrow the world. And you have seen my instrument already—the Wasp Empire will be my sword.”
“An Empire has no hilt,” Uctebri pointed out.
“But it does, if you know how to grasp it.” He could not look at her smile now. It was too bright, too much like the fires of the Wasp machines.
* * *
A day later, on the road with the Beetle woman trotting with the sack of relics at Julaea’s heels, he asked, “Why do they follow you?”
“Hope,” she said, watching his eyes stray to the labouring Ruthan. “They haven’t all forgotten the golden Days of Lore, the Beetles. Some of them, some few families, remember the love their kind once bore us.”
A love so great they overthrew you and drove you from all your places of power, Uctebri thought, but then she gave him a sideways look and asked “And here you are. So why do you follow?”
“New blood is always a draw for an old man.” Uctebri’s grin was marred by withered lips and sharp teeth. “And your blood is very new indeed, unlike any I’ve sampled.”
“Unlike like any you ever will, Old Bloodsucker.”
“A better question is why you invited me to follow you. A frail old husk like me.”
“I know power when I smell it. My people have spent centuries playing status games and ignoring the world. I will collect powerful people. I will stand on their shoulders. Even yours, old man. You’re a Sarcad, a great man amongst the Mosquito.”
“What little that is worth.”
“Don’t you want to make it mean something again?”
He stopped dead. “Am I hearing a Moth-kinden planning the return of the Mosquito? Or do you just want us out in the open so you can finish the job?”
She rounded on him, eyes flashing with a cold anger. “I will use every tool life gives me to bring down the cities of the Apt and revive the rule of magic. I will strike down anyone that stands against me, even the great lords of my own kinden. We have been in decline for half a century, all we old powers. We have retreated to our holes and forests, or traded our magic for empty ceremony or mere manipulation. It is time to fight back!” Her last word rang out across the countryside, a challenge to the world. “Aid me, lend me your shoulder and lift me high, and your people will share in the victory. Stand in my way and the last blood you see will be your own.”
He was suddenly aware of steel brushing his wrinkled neck—the Mantis was at his back, her spear levelled to spit him.
“Well, well, then,” he said softly. “Let the Wasps and the Ants and the Beetles fall upon one another. If there is no new age of magic at the end of it, at least there will be blood.”
“Oh, there is always blood,” she agreed.
* * *
A tenday of hard travel and buying trinkets from the Wasps saw them camping beside barren stretch of road picked clean by the war, the blackened ribs of a dead village the only landmark. That dusk he awoke to find Julaea waiting for him, her disciples gathered to her. Something had changed. For a dry-throated moment he thought they were going to kill him.
“What do you think, then, Old Bloodsucker?” she asked him. “Are you one of us?” Her gesture took in her other followers: the Beetle fussing over their supplies; the Mantis standing silent and still, a sentry whose vigilance was entirely directed at him.
Uctebri settled himself across from the Moth, sitting on the hard ground with his pale hands on his knees. His magic was stronger, out here in the wilds away from the machinations of the Apt. Julaea’s company, her words and dreams, had rejuvenated him.
“You’ve got a good thing going on here,” he remarked. “Quite a trove of Commonwealer knick-knacks in that bag of yours. Drain them all at once and you’d have quite the fistful of magic to accomplish...what? Or is it home now, for you? Going to teach your kin a lesson for slighting your father?”
“If it was?” she asked.
“Then we part company,” he told her. “Let your Mantis chase me down if you will, but your people will not want a reminder that they did not quite kill all of mine when they had the chance, for all you appear not to care.”
“Very wise,” she said, baring that razor grin again. “Better the crossed spears of the Wasps than what my people’d do to you. But no, not home. I’m scarce more welcome there than you, Old Bloodsucker. I make my own way. When I overturn the world of the Apt, I’ll make my people come to the court of the Wasps and beg.”
“With that bag of trinkets you’ll command the Wasp Empire?” And is this it? Is she just the mad daughter of a cripple? “Raise a storm, yes. Cloud a few minds or have some fearful merchant cut his own throat, but I’ve seen the Empire at work.”
He had let his disdain show, and abruptly he was aware of how close Shonaen, the Mantis, was, dispassionately ready to kill him
at a nod from her mistress.
Yet Julaea just smiled. “Old Bloodsucker, this is merely the gift that shall see my petition heard. This, and the power you still have in your dried-up body.”
“A petition in what court?” He could no longer look at that smile. When she said, “Shonaen, tell him,” it was a relief to look into the long, sallow face of the Mantis.
“I’m going home,” Shonaen pronounced, as though the words were as much a surprise to her as anyone else.
“What home? The...” Uctebri tried to remember where the Lowlander Mantids even lived, “Nethyon, is it?”
Julaea sang out before Shonaen had a chance. “Not the Nethyon or the Etheryon. Not the Felyal or even Sacred Parosyal. My Shonaen is the last scion of another hold entirely. Tell me of the Darakyon, Old Bloodsucker.”
Uctebri let that name lie in the dark a long while before he picked it up. “There are no Mantids of the Darakyon. Not for generations.”
“Some few survived. Now, only one remains, inheritrix of all that sorrow,” Julaea confirmed. “So tell me why, Uctebri.”
He forced himself to meet the cutting edge of her expression. “Because your people did something terrible there. When the Apt threw you off and you had lost everything, your magi went to the Darakyon and tried to turn back history. Even my people felt it, as we hid in our holes. A ritual of fear and darkness so that none of the Apt would ever sleep soundly again. And you failed, you Moths. You overreached yourselves and poisoned the whole forest, destroyed the Mantis hold there. None walked out of that place, and only fools have walked in since.”
“And what do they say of Shonaen’s ancestral halls nowadays, old man?”
“That the ghosts of every Mantis and Moth still hang on the thorns there like old clothes,” Uctebri told her. “That visitors are not welcomed.”
“My people say the same,” Julaea told him. “What they do not say is that there is power in the Darakyon, that they will not reach for out of guilt.”
“And you know no guilt.”
“No more than you, Old Bloodsucker. I will go before the twisted spirit of the Darakyon and I shall harness it to my will. I shall pluck out its heart and corrupt the very Emperor with promises of power. I shall bring ruin to all the cities of the Apt.” Her white eyes gleamed with triumph. “You’re smiling now, old man. It’s a fearful, shrivelled thing, but I know a smile when I see it.”
“With your power and mine, with the stolen relics of the Commonweal and your Mantis’s birthright, you’ll enslave the Darakyon?”
“Do you doubt me?”
And she was right, he was smiling.
* * *
They made tracks south, into that disputed territory that was neither Empire nor Commonweal nor Lowlands. To the east the Wasps had crushed every city to forge their gateway to the Commonweal. To the west Julaea’s people kept to their mountain fastness of Tharn while the Beetles grubbed for coin in smoky Helleron. But between all these lay a stretch of forest that the roads passed north or south around; the Apt did not believe in ghosts, any more than they believed in Mosquito-kinden, but that just meant they had to invent rational reasons why they did not brave the trees.
Yet when Julaea and her tattered followers drew near forest’s edge, the Black and Gold of the Imperial armies was already on display, armour gleaming in the dawn. Not some loot-fat band of slavers heading home from the Commonweal, but three score of the Light Airborne, scouts creeping past the ever-shifting borders of the Empire. Just as Julaea had said, the Wasps had their eyes on their western neighbours, whose wealth was not in old gold but in machines and industry. They were scouting out the way, seeing how far their soldiers might march before the self-involved Lowlanders took note of them.
“You can make a deal with these Wasps?” Uctebri asked the Moth.
She shook her head. “Slavers are easy to suborn. They’re all in the business to make a private fortune. This lot are watching for Lowlander spies.” A Moth, a Mantis and a Beetle. Whatever the Wasps might make of Uctebri, the others would fit the clothes of spies well enough. “We’ll go past them at night.”
“The forest will be stronger then,” he noted, knowing it would not sway her.
“So will we.”
* * *
The Wasps had a good watch out, but they lit few fires and had no eyes for the dark. What was plain was that more of their number had gone to scout the forest, no matter the stories they must have heard. The soldiers on the outside were growing increasingly skittish the longer their comrades were absent. Uctebri reckoned they would start burning things soon. He wondered how the Darakyon would react to that. In the harsh light of day, in these weak modern times, magic could not defeat Apt scepticism. At night, or under the shadowed canopy, a man’s fears would creep up on him and poison his mind, throwing open all those doors that the old ways drew their power from. The Apt were right to fear the dark.
Julaea led them past the sentries’ very noses. Uctebri had expected the Beetle, Ruthan, to tread on every stick and get herself killed, but Julaea wove the darkness and the night’s silence about them. Uctebri flicked at the soldiers’ minds to make them jump at all the wrong shadows, and the four of them were within the trees without the Wasps being any the wiser.
Uctebri felt the place the moment they set foot beneath its boughs. The Moths had tried their great ritual soon after the revolution. Five centuries of twisted, failed magic had festered in this place. The trees grew crooked and warty, hunched like murderers caught in the act. Overhead, the canopy layered hands of leaves until it strangled the moonlight. The forest watched them through each twig, each leaf. The night-flying insects were its spies, the ferns and moss its agents.
“How it hates us,” Julaea whispered.
“It hates you,” Uctebri corrected. The lens of the forest’s attention was fixed on the Moth. It remembers her kin, and how they ruined it. How pleasant not to be the most loathed for once.
And yet Julaea pressed on, undaunted. She clutched the sack of Commonweal loot, and Uctebri could feel her drawing on the power that ancient magicians had stored there. Was this what those dead Dragonflies had foreseen, some renegade Moth burning their days of meditation to twist the arms of ghosts? But she spent it recklessly, treading ever deeper into the trees with Ruthan scuttling in her shadow and Shonaen striding at her side.
“You’re home, Mantis,” Uctebri remarked, careful not to be left behind. “Rejoice.”
She stared at him. Her eyes said she had no idea who he was or where she was. Her body said she was about to kill him. Then she leant forwards, spear extended, and he heard the scrape of metal on metal. They had found what was left of the Wasp expedition.
Mostly he saw their armour. It lay between the trees with only a few white bones to evidence the wearers. Saplings grew through arm-holes and neck-holes, roots clawing through bracers and greaves and ferns springing in lurid sprays through the twisted holes that had let the blood out. The soldiers who had gone in that day had left a display looking decades old.
Uctebri felt a distinct shifting around him, physical and spiritual. The wood had not been fighting them before, not truly. Now it had them where it wanted them.
All around them, the forest shivered like the skin of a living thing. The branches overhead sawed at one another, a sudden wind keening through them like voices.
“Now,” Julaea said, calm personified. “Join with me. Or die with me.”
Uctebri needed no encouragement. They were in the depths of the darkness here, nothing of the Apt world outside to fetter him. He reached out against the louring wall of the forest’s power and braced himself, feeling the Moth do the same, wrestling with the space around them to deny the trees their movement. A moment’s slip and the trunks would close on them like teeth, the branches pierce like spears. And it was strong! Julaea had been right about this place. It was a great fouled well of old power neither tapped nor ebbed in centuries.
He fe
lt the massed mind of the Darakyon try to fold the world about them, to turn its crooked trunks and withered boughs into jaws to crush them. But there was something lacking, some final force that would have cracked their mortal efforts like eggshells. They held, and then Julaea took a step forwards, and the forest swayed back around them, forced away by her iron will.
“Warriors!” Ruthan cried, squinting into the darkness. Past the stretch and twist of the tortured air, quick shapes came darting, long-limbed and bearing weapons. Caught by the forest’s pressing strength, Uctebri felt a flare of panic as though their steel was at his throat already. He was an old hand at magic, though. His mind did not waver, though the forest forced fear into him through eyes and ears and nostrils.
Shonaen stepped forwards almost lazily, as though none of it was real. She took the first figure on her spear, spun about to catch another. A sword like a slice of moonlight flared at her face and she leant back no more than three inches to avoid it. The ghost warriors crowded at her, and she carved at them with her arm spines until they fell back again. No urgency touched her movements. She was like a soldier sleep-walking through weapons drill, stepping note-perfect through her forms and passes as though she was fighting dreams and shadows.
And she was, Uctebri knew. These phantasms had no more substance to them than the dark between the trees, even animated by the ghosts the forest was crawling with. It was an old magician’s trick that few could master these days. Phantoms, but they could kill like real warriors, belief in them leaping from the points of their blades into the wounds they made.
And yet Julaea pressed on, a step at a time, towards the forest’s centre, Uctebri bringing up the rear to prevent the forest crashing down on them as Shonaen danced her casual murders on either side.
“What are we seeking?” Uctebri demanded. “How will you rule here? It will not have you as its master.” And indeed the Darakyon was showing no signs of giving up. “It hates you like poison!”
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 11
