Blood of the Mantis

Nine

‘Who else is aware of this?’ asked Alvdan, revealing just a hint of uncertainty that was unbecoming in an Emperor. The news had shaken him a little.

‘The servants within the harem, and of course the other concubines,’ General Maxin said. ‘Two other servants from the palace proper. They are presently being held to my order.’

‘Let it be known they have incurred our displeasure,’ said Alvdan, which meant death, of course: he had taken a liking to the phrase recently. ‘General, this could have just as easily been our throat laid open.’ He splayed his hands anxiously, feeling the charge of his sting build in them. The news was so fresh that he was still in his nightshirt, alone with General Maxin in his bedchamber, even his personal body servants having been dismissed.

‘The chief of the harem guards shall be disciplined, your Imperial Majesty,’ said Maxin smoothly.

‘She shall be more than disciplined, General!’

‘Your Imperial Majesty, we must not draw unnecessary attention to this.’

Alvdan looked at him, narrow-eyed. ‘You mean the situation in Szar?’

‘I do.’ General Maxin’s mind was spinning, laying the pieces of his plan into place. Another step intervening between the Emperor and his Empire. Another few bricks in the wall he was building around the man, until it was General Maxin who would have sole access to the throne – and thus become the power behind it. ‘The Bee-kinden of Szar are extremely important to the war effort. You must know how much we rely on their foundries and forges. The presence of their queen here has so far guaranteed their loyalty. As a result our Szaren garrison is currently one of the lightest in the Empire.’

‘Have it strengthened then, and damn their suspicions,’ Alvdan snapped. ‘Who would inherit now? How do the Bee-kinden manage their idiot succession?’

‘By simple primogeniture in the female line. There are two princesses and a prince, my records tell me.’ Maxin said. He had known of Tserinet’s death for less than an hour but he had the most efficient clerks in the world within the Rekef’s administration. ‘Maczech, the eldest princess, is currently a house-guest of the garrison commander, Colonel Gan, treated with all honour but still a hostage to her mother’s good behaviour. The prince, her junior and not eligible by their customs anyway, is an Auxillian captain garrisoning Luscoa near the Commonweal border. The younger girl is about twelve and lives in Szar with her family. She is not of the direct royal lineage but a niece to the late queen. We must move carefully, your Majesty, and meanwhile I will ensure that Maczech is kept secure.’

‘Do so,’ Alvdan agreed, ‘and think up some excuse for tripling the garrison at Szar. Tell them we are suspicious of another Mynan rebellion or something.’ He sighed. ‘It seems today shall no longer be mine to dispose of. The Sarcad was to examine my sister once more, was he not? Let him know he should proceed in my absence, because I shall not have time to indulge myself.’

As if suddenly struck by a thought, or hearing a voice otherwise unheard, Uctebri grinned to himself, needle teeth stark white against withered lips. He was such a repulsive little man when he was not concentrating on impressing her, she decided, with his head bald and veiny, and his scant, lank hair thin and grey. His features were hollow, his lips wrinkled and the few fangs they concealed were like needles of bone or the lancing teeth of fish. On his forehead, beneath his translucent skin, was a red patch that constantly shifted and squirmed, and his eyes… his eyes were evil. Seda had not believed in evil before she met him. His red and piercing eyes seemed to stare into her very being, flaying her layer by layer.

But he claimed to be on her side, so that must be all right.

Seda, youngest and sole surviving sibling of the Emperor, did not trust Uctebri the Sarcad one fraction, yet still he was more on her side than anyone else she knew. He had a use for her, clearly, while to the rest of the world she seemed simply to be filling space. Or at least until Alvdan had decided on the succession, whereupon she would finally incur his displease, as her brother was now phrasing it. She would be then seen no more in the world of men, which was Uctebri’s phrase, and one she marginally preferred.

Uctebri called her Princess sometimes, too, a Commonwealer title she had no right to, but that was pretty enough. In truth she could not even claim to be a Chattelaine, the half-derogatory term for an influential Wasp’s wife. She had neither husband nor household. Her life, her bloodline, had left her nothing but fear as an inheritance.

Seda had never known her grandfather, and her father had spared no time for her, but here was a surrogate relative of an older generation for her: Uncle Uctebri of the fabled Mosquito-kinden that they frightened children with. When he made the effort, he showed her exactly how his grotesque kind had survived so long. When he put his mind and his Art to it, he could show himself so engaging and compelling that she found herself forgetting his grotesque appearance and provenance.

He claimed he was preparing her for the ritual that her brother so much desired, a ritual that would gift Alvdan with eternal life. She believed none of it. What she did believe, though, was that Uctebri did not trust her brother. It was a sentiment she easily concurred with.

And so, by delicate stages, they had become conspirators.

She was supposed to be strapped to a couch, laid out for him to hunch over and probe and touch. When her brother was watching they would play the charade out. In his absence, however, Uctebri would use his Art to muddy the mind of her guard, then she could be unstrapped and sit up for a more civilized encounter.

‘Your brother needs more to think about,’ the Mosquito informed her. His voice was a soft rustle.

‘If he is growing impatient, surely you can baffle him, O Sarcad,’ she challenged. She liked to play at games of strength with Uctebri, and he gained a distant enjoyment from them that he would never draw from any experiment upon her body. Despite her royal bloodline that all but touched the throne, she was in fact alone and had nothing. He enjoyed seeing her test herself against him. In fact he encouraged it.

He had plans for her.

‘Yes, he will grow impatient if my anticipated services are all he can expend his thought on,’ the Mosquito admitted. ‘I will have the Shadow Box soon but, until that oaf Maxin has recovered it for me, I shall attempt no ritual, either for you or for him. Until my wages are paid I shall have to take his mind off things.’

‘What do you propose?’ she enquired.

He gave her a smile, a quick flash of those needle teeth. ‘Would your brother be distressed to discover one of his concubines was dead, do you think, Princess?’

‘No, why would he care?’ she almost laughed at the thought. ‘I can’t think of a single man, woman or child whose death would discomfort him. Not even that bastard Maxin’s.’

Uctebri steepled his delicate fingers. ‘You do him an injustice, for at this moment he is particularly distressed. The death of one of his harem has just upset many of his plans.’

She stared at him. ‘Explain yourself, Sarcad.’

He drew close, raising one cold hand to softly touch her face. ‘I have known both kings and queens in my time, and in my long experience they are quite unsightly. What a bloodline you have! Your brother, so regular of feature, handsome and well proportioned – quite the hero-king of legend. And you, my dear princess, what a queen you might make.’

She shivered because, although the thought was not new to her, it was still the worst treason to express it. ‘The Empire has no queens. No woman can inherit.’

‘So says a history all of merely three generations old.’ Uctebri’s lips twitched. ‘I am older than your Empire, and I know how these things can change. Maybe, if a certain bold young woman should begin to unfurl her wings… especially with her brother so distracted.’

‘Distracted by what? Tell me plainly, will you?’

‘The Queen of Szar killed herself last night.’ His protuberant red eyes glinted, bleakly pleased. ‘She had been oppressed by dark thoughts for night after night. It was inevitable, really.’

‘You are a monster,’ Seda chided him.

‘You disapprove, O Queen-in-waiting?’

She realized that, beneath it all, she did not. It meant so little to her, the fate of some woman she had never met. How like him I am, at heart. ‘Speak on.’

‘Naturally, the news is confined to the harem, and it is your brother’s intention that it should stay there.’

‘I understand the nature of the hold we have on Szar and the Bee-kinden.’ She forced herself to look into those bloody eyes, but his Art had started working on her now, so that they appeared almost benign – the malice in them dissolving before her gaze.

‘I rather think the sad news may become known in Szar sooner than might otherwise be expected,’ Uctebri said, delicately.

‘You can… But of course you can. But this will damage the Empire.’

‘Which is a merely a weapon in your brother’s hands at present. Time enough later to whip your subjects back into line,’ he told her. ‘For now, I think it best that your brother finds himself ever more deeply involved in matters both within the Empire and without. It is only to your benefit, Princess, because you will need all the space for manoeuvre that you can muster. You have a great deal of work to do, I believe.’

‘And should I start by granting the boon I see you about to request of me?’

Her remark left him absolutely silent, his red eyes gleaming as he examined her.

‘I read it in your face, monster,’ she said softly. ‘Have I not done well?’

He suddenly bared his teeth in a smile of true approbation. ‘Oh, well done, Princess. My kind are not so easily read, after all. Your skills are impressive, but then you have survived by them these last several years, have you not?’

‘Oh, I have, at that.’

‘You are perfect,’ he observed, with such utter sincerity. He was grotesque and hideous of spirit, and she was just a tool to him, but she was an implement that he valued and even had care for. It was a bitter truth that the Princess of the Empire had no other who showed her any greater regard than that, but it was a truth nonetheless.

‘We shall meet again tonight. I shall have them bring you to me. My invention is limitless when it comes to finding excuses to enjoy your company. So you shall come to me tonight, and we shall enact a little ritual all of our own. It is time you were tested.’

She dressed for him carefully. She wore a gown of red, in respect for his overriding obsession, that was worked with black in complex patterns at the hems. It was some Dragonfly war loot that had eventually found its way into her wardrobe, never worn before.

She sat before her mirror, with her body servants, and had them tend to her make-up as though she was to be flaunted before generals.

A test, she thought, and what if I fail? If she failed then, at least, when the worst came, she would look a true princess. In the Commonweal, where her dress came from, the women wore swords. She would have girded on a blade too, if custom had permitted. She still had her sting, of course, although she had never had cause to turn it on another human being. Knowing Uctebri’s passions, perhaps I shall have cause to turn it on myself.

I am so alone that I must find this repulsive monster my ally, putting my life in his thin hands.

She stood up, seeing in the mirror a reflected Seda of the might-have-been. For a moment she could not quite recognize herself in that image. There was pride there, and strength, and a cruelty that had graced the eyes of her father and now her brother. A moment later she was clutching at the shoulders of her servants, dizzy with it, for she thought she had seen, behind that silvered doppelganger, the flames of battle, countless airborne war-machines and a thousand soldiers marching against a reddened sky.

The guard had arrived to fetch her. She noticed him start slightly at the sight of her, trying to match this formidable image with the princess he had seen last.

The room she was brought to was lined with black stone as a result of the vanity of some courtier of her late father. She guessed that, over the last few days, the servants had been kept busy polishing, so that floor, walls and even ceiling all gleamed. In the centre stood Uctebri, surrounded by a ring of tall iron candelabra. Each candle-flame that he had lit was doubled and redoubled by the polished walls, until it seemed she and the Mosquito stood in a gloom pierced by a hundred guttering stars.

‘You are on edge, creature,’ Seda observed. ‘More than usual I think. What has caught you by the hair this time?’

Uctebri showed his teeth, either in grimace or grin. He had little enough hair, in truth, and his scalp gleamed in the candlelight.

‘Or have you decided to support my brother after all? It wouldn’t surprise me, given that he is Emperor already. What can I offer against that? Perhaps this has been his game to tempt me into treason.’

‘On his slightest word, you would die, Princess,’ Uctebri said. ‘Games, he might play, but he has no need to see any proof of your perfidy. It is not as though his fraternal love for you restrains him.’

‘That it does not,’ she agreed. ‘So what, magician? What has got into you?’

He said nothing for a moment, just went on lighting candles. Then: ‘You make a remarkable show tonight, Princess. I had not asked it of you.’

‘Should the spirits of fate not see me at my best? You have prodded and pried and measured me all this while, but now you say there are tests still to come.’

‘It is now time to make my real test,’ Uctebri said, as he lit the final flame. His expression, shifting and flickering with the light, looked doubting as he turned it on her. ‘All this time I have informed your brother of the tests I have conducted on you, some of it true, some false, but for me this is the real test – and you must pass.’

She felt a sinking in her heart. That was what was now different about the man: he was, for once, entirely serious. Gone were the coy insinuations, the mockery, even the grotesque flirtation he seemed to indulge in. Now he had become Uctebri the Sarcad, a magus of the legendary Mosquito-kinden, and he was about to determine her future.

‘And if I fail?’ she asked. She was used, through long experience, to appear calm in these times of trial. Her brother had put her through enough practice already.

‘Then you will be of no use to me. We will be of no use to each other. I shall instead make what I can out of your brother’s inferior clay.’ She thought she heard genuine regret in his tone. He would far rather it was me. Can I take comfort from that? She could not because, in her prolongedly precarious state, there was no comfort to be had from any source.

‘Make your test, then,’ she told him. ‘What must I do? Run? Jump? Do you wish me to sing to you, monster?’

‘My test has already begun. I simply require you to watch me and listen. I will know, after I am done, whether you are my suitable material or not.’

‘But all you’ve done so far is light candles…’ she observed.

‘Yes, so many candles.’ He moved about the room, seemingly aimless. The myriad darts of light confused her eyes. It was impossible to even tell where the walls were now, such was the multiplication of reflections. Surely he had stepped beyond this room somehow, she kept thinking, but then he would turn, and she had to take it on faith that there was a wall there that had turned him.

He was reflected alongside the constellations of candle-flames, of course, but as she watched she felt her stomach start to turn, because she could not quite match them to him, some were too far, others too near. ‘Sarcad…’ she whispered, ‘what are you doing?’

‘Magic,’ and he continued his pacing. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘Of course I hear you,’ she said, and felt that, even as she spoke, her words were covering some other voice that had given answer to the same question.

‘We are at the crux,’ Uctebri said, and she was surer than ever that he was not actually talking to her. ‘Come now. Make yourselves apparent.’ His tone was still low, almost conversational. Shrouded in his dark robe he seemed to appear and disappear as he turned towards and away from her, his face pale in the candlelight, until she had lost track of which was the real Uctebri, and which were merely the reflections.

The reflections…

She concentrated her gaze on the marble of the floor beneath her because it was the one keepsake left of the room she had walked into. She had only the hard sense of it beneath her feet, for her eyes now saw just a distant perspective of lights and darkness and the scrawny faces of the Mosquito-kinden, and her ears told her that the space about her was vast, with distant, forlorn winds channelling forever through twisted passages…

The reflections were all solely of him. There were none of her at all.

‘Be not shy,’ Uctebri murmured. ‘We must risk much so as to gain more. Come to me. Come now.’

The nearest reflection turned to regard her, and she realized that it was not Uctebri at all. The neck was thinner, and there was a wisp of beard on its wrinkled chin. An older man of the same race, with the same blood-red and protuberant eyes. Some others lacked Uctebri’s blotchy birthmark, and some, she saw, were haggard old women, as vile and balding as their menfolk. One by one they had all turned, and now every face there was staring at her, and she could not have picked Uctebri out from among them. The massed malevolence of that gaze, a score of desiccated, red-eyed monsters, rocked her and chilled her to the bone, but still she faced up to them. She stood her ground. If she fled now, she would, she knew, find herself beyond the stone room’s vanished walls, never to be seen again.

‘She sees us,’ one of the Mosquitoes declared.

‘Yes,’ said another, one that she recognized a moment later as Uctebri himself. ‘Yes, she does.’ His tone was one of relief, and she knew then that she had passed his test.

‘What…?’ Her voice came out as a croak, so she swallowed and spoke again. ‘What does this mean?’

‘That you have entered our world,’ said another voice. Between the flickering light and the sheer number of them she could not discern who had spoken. ‘That we can make use of you.’

‘I have no wish to be made use,’ she told them. ‘I am no tool of yours.’

‘Yes, she will do well,’ said one of the women. ‘Your judgment is sound as ever, Uctebri.’

‘What does she know? How much have you told her?’ asked another, suspiciously.

‘Enough. Only what she needs to know,’ Uctebri said. ‘I intend to show her more, though. She can do more of her own will than when forced, but for that we must allow her a freer rein.’

‘You have the ear of their Emperor,’ said one, using the word with outright derision.

‘And I know what sound will best reach it,’ Uctebri said drily, from wherever he was. ‘I have an errand for some servant of ours, whoever is best placed to travel to Szar.’

‘The Bee-kinden city? Why should those primitives concern us?’

‘Oh, no great matter,’ Uctebri said, and at last Seda saw him clearly amongst the ranks of his peers, ‘save that there is some small piece of news they had best know.’