Blood of the Mantis

Eleven

Her name was Xaraea and she had been the first to see this coming.

That was the joke, really, because she was such a poor seer. Like any Moth-kinden of standing she had learned the mouldy principles of magic, but she had never had any particular gift for it. She lacked that specific kind of concentration that made it possible to pluck apart the weave of the world and then reknit it as she wished. She would never be a true magician, and that meant, in the hierarchy of Tharn, that there was a ceiling above which she could never fly.

Yet here she was and the future of her city – of her world – rested on her shoulders. She had her own talents, she had found: her own sort of concentration. While her peers had studied the workings of the universe, her lessons had been in human nature: politics, commerce, all the strings that bound each individual to each other. Xaraea had played the games of the Spider-kinden, even served as ambassador to them for three years, learning the trade of deception from the mistresses of the art. In short, she was Arcanum: the secret cult of spies and agents through which the Moth-kinden gathered their secrets, and feuded amongst one another.

They had found uses for her talents other than magic. She had a good mind for logic. She had intuition. She had a deft hand, too, that could be turned to many tasks. She had undertaken her first murder on her twentieth birthday. The victim had been another Moth who had never known that he had been judged and condemned. Such were the games of the Arcanum.

The Arcanum: it was a word merely whispered throughout the remnants of the Moth culture. Many other races had their spies and agents acting as their sword against treason and their shield from enemy eyes. The Dragonflies had their Mercers and the Empire its brutal Rekef, but the Arcanum was the oldest secret service of them all, so encrusted with traditions and exceptions that it barely qualified as such. It was a blade in the hands of any Skryre that cared to take it up, and it had been turned inward more often than not in the silent, secret struggles that the Moth elders waged upon each other, murder and blackmail and espionage based on prophecy and ancient philosophy.

When the Wasp Empire had commenced its Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal, the Moths had finally begun to take notice. Not till then, nor even as recently as a month ago, had most of them considered that this extreme might come: Tharn at the Empire’s mercy. Xaraea’s patrons had shown more foresight, though. Out of curiosity and divination, they had set her the task of finding a shield against the Empire.

Xaraea had gone into the Empire twice, masquerading as a slave, trying to understand this vital, bloody-handed new power emerging into the world. Her exit, with a faked death enacted each time to stave off their hunters, had brought back to Tharn more information than it knew what to do with. In the Days of Lore, her race had been noted for its understanding of the minds of others, but that faculty had atrophied ever since the revolution.

She had gone into that Empire and studied its workings, and sought out contacts, and installed her agents amongst the slaves and subjects of the Wasps. She had put out her feelers delicately, seeking some solution to the grinding advance of the imperial armies that would come to Tharn sooner or later. Delicately, through intermediaries of intermediaries and by the most fallible means possible, Xaraea had constructed the faintest outline of a solution.

How it had all come home now: Xaraea the intelligencer and spy, whose fragile plan would either save or doom her city.

It was bright day outside but the city had not gone to bed. Instead she looked out of the window, shielding her eyes.

The sky was full of airships. There were other flying machines, too, landing out in the fields, digging great ruts across them. Wasp soldiers swarmed in a cloud about them, and one by one they were dropping to perch on the countless balconies and the statues, or cling to the carved reliefs. Their hands were extended in open-palmed threat, but the people of Tharn stood patiently and offered them no harm, made no suggestion of resistance. Not a blade nor a bow could be seen. After all, what good would they be against the artificers’ weapons that bedecked the flying machines?

Because it was her plan, Xaraea had to go down there to see if this desperate, infinitely unlikely clutching at fate could be made to serve them. She spread her dark wings and pushed off through the window, descending in a slow spiral to meet the rulers of the Wasps.

The new Governor of Tharn was arriving.

The Wasp felt a steadying as the airship’s painter-lines were lashed to whatever could be found to secure them. He supposed that meant statuary and embossed carvings. If there was a strong wind tonight then there would doubtless be a few headless effigies amid the friezes of Tharn in the morning.

He was merely thirty years of age, and only a major. For one of his age and that rank, this honour was unheard of. True, he had been helped on his way, like a man boosted up over a wall by his fellows, but he had worked hard for it, too. He might have his handicaps, but they had taught him guile and craft until he had become as nimble a manipulator of opinion as anyone within the Empire.

His name was Tegrec, and he had been given the governorship of Tharn.

Of course that did not mean the Empire regarded Tharn highly, since the Moth hold was viewed as some kind of rustic appendix to Helleron, without industry, without wealth, without even a dependable source of labour, the Moth-kinden being a slim and feeble race. He had fought for this post, but had not had to fight too hard once his name was on the right lips. In that, he had been helped along.

‘All secured, Major,’ said Raeka, his body slave. Tegrec went nowhere without his slaves, most especially his constant attendant Raeka, a slight, dark-haired Wasp woman, not pretty but clever and loyal. Behind him stood his personal guards, a brace of Mantis-kinden he had bound to him by understanding and manipulating their system of honour. They were prepared to be his slaves simply because he had assured them that, whatever else the Empire believed, he would never treat them as such. With such a concession he had won their hearts and minds.

His reliance on his slaves and his refusal to travel without them had given him a reputation in the Empire for decadence and a willingness to impose his power on others. Of course, they did not know of his handicap, his burden and his joy, that made all this so necessary.

I have been waiting for this moment for a score of years at least. Dare I call it fate? Perhaps I do.

Major Tegrec made a gesture and Raeka opened the door for him, turning a wheel and swinging out the disc of metal-rimmed wood. He could hear the not-quite-silence of several hundred Wasp soldiers waiting for him and, beyond them, in silence absolute, the Moths…

One of his Mantis bodyguards stepped out first, casting a suspicious eye over invaders and locals alike. He wore his clawed gauntlet, the blade folded back along his arm. Then it was Tegrec’s turn, and he paused in the gondola’s hatchway, seeing his invasion force snap to attention and salute. No need for any of you, it seems, he thought. Are you relieved not to have to go down into those tunnels and passageways to root them out? Or disappointed that there’s to be no rape and plunder? He made sure they had a good look at him, standing there with one foot on the rim of the hatchway, one hand on the circular door, his non-regulation blue cloak, secured by a golden brooch, billowing heroically in the wind. Tegrec the conqueror, the only major ever to be made a city governor. An unassuming figure, really, which was why he wore the cloak, the gold armlets and the torc, all to convey the image of a rather greater man. In truth his hair was starting to recede and he was thicker at the waist than a Wasp soldier should really be, and not quite as tall as most. No matter, his soldiers and the Tharen Moths would only remember this moment of his arrival.

As he stepped down, his most senior captain came to salute before him. ‘No resistance, sir. None at all. Aside from knives and a few hunting bows, not even any arms to speak of. Of course, there may be others concealed further in.’

‘And what statement have they made? Do they wish to negotiate? Is this a surrender or merely a truce, Captain?’ Tegrec loved the sound of his own voice, a cherished vanity: it was smooth and supple, and made up for the lack of height and hair.

‘A woman speaks for them, sir,’ the captain said derisively. ‘She says they know they cannot resist our superior strength, therefore they will accede to the Emperor’s authority.’

‘And you don’t believe that,’ Tegrec noted. It was clear that this veteran soldier wanted his quota of violence. ‘It has been known, captain, that, whether through pragmatism or genuine enthusiasm, some communities succumb to the Emperor’s legions with never a blow struck. Fly-kinden and Beetle-kinden, for example, all sensible and peaceable types. The Empire has, as yet, no Moth-kinden within it, but they are reckoned wise, so why should they not take the sensible course?’

‘Sir, they are also said to be clever,’ said the captain, as though this was the ultimate insult.

‘You expect an ambush in the dark? Well, it is possible.’ Tegrec had to keep reminding himself that it was entirely possible. The ground he stood on, the plans he had made, were all quite open to change. ‘However, we can torch their fields and besiege them, starve them out, destroy their carvings, even haul Mole Crickets up here to tear away their stone. They know this, captain, because they are not fools. I will parley with their leaders, and explain to them what the Empire shall require in terms of garrison, taxes and the like. I am otherwise willing to spare the Empire’s resources, and the lives of her soldiers.’

The captain nodded, clearly still not convinced. ‘Their woman, she said that their leaders – she called them something but I can’t recall quite what – would be waiting to offer their formal surrender to you.’

Skryres, Tegrec recalled, and the word made his heart race a little. ‘Very good, Captain,’ he said calmly, as Raeka stepped up beside him, bearing his sword for him. ‘I see no reason to delay, so lead me to them.’

They brought him to the Tharen spokeswoman first, a slight, grey-skinned woman of close on his own age. She was dressed in the elegant robes that all Moths of a certain station seemed to wear. So colourless, all of them: grey stone and grey skins, grey robes and white eyes and dark hair. This one was attractive, though, in an exotic kind of way, and he had a reputation for lechery to maintain, both amongst his own people and the slaves he kept. Not Raeka, though, never her. She was too precious to him to use up and cast aside.

Knowing the eyes of the army were on him, he gripped the Moth spokeswoman’s chin in one hand and tilted her head back so that he could admire her face, then her profile. In a voice that would not carry past his guards he said, ‘And you are Xaraea, I believe.’

‘I am, Governor,’ she said.

‘And the… the Skryres are waiting, are they not?’

‘For the pleasure of your company, Governor.’

He could see she was on edge. They had never met before, but he had received so many messages from her, or from her Arcanum, that he felt he knew her. He could see the uncertainty behind the proud defiance.

‘Take me to them,’ he directed.

The Moths had lit lamps for him. It was a considerate touch. The lit path led to an amphitheatre, its rings of stone seats quite empty of spectators, but the bluish-white lanterns cast shadows there instead. Three Moth-kinden, none of them young, were awaiting him at the far end. Looking from face to face, he found he could not read them. If they were trembling at the change he brought with him or if they were contemptuous, even if they were plotting to betray him already, he could not tell.

‘You may leave us, Captain,’ Tegrec said.

‘Sir?’

‘A simple enough order, was it not?’ Tegrec arched an eyebrow at the man. ‘I have my guards, Captain.’

The captain eyed the Mantis-kinden guards as if to say they were all very well, but they were not imperial soldiers. ‘Sir, are you…?’

‘Do you genuinely fear they will use their Art on me, to rob me of my wits? I assure you, I am proof against it.’

‘It’s not that, sir, but…’

Seeing the man’s expression, containing fear and hatred and doubt all mixed, Tegrec laughed quietly. ‘Surely you do not think they will… what? Bewitch me? I had not put you down as some superstitious savage, Captain.’

‘Of course not, sir.’ The man looked rebellious but saluted, and led his soldiers out.

And let us see if this gamble pays a dividend, thought Tegrec. For if it does not, then neither Tharn nor I will do well out of it. He nodded to his guards, and they stepped back a pace, leaving only Raeka immediately beside him.

Seeing the soldiers leave, Xaraea took a place halfway between him and her masters.

‘Elders of Tharn,’ he said, his voice, even when pitched low, resonating about the chamber. ‘Skryres of the Moth-kinden, I am Tegrec, Major of the Imperial Army. Do I need any further introduction?’

‘You are the one the Wasp Emperor has sent to rule over our city,’ answered the middle of the three.

‘I hope I’m more than that,’ he told them. Despite their stern countenances he sat himself down on the lowest tier of seats. ‘A great deal of work has gone into bringing me here: me, rather than some other candidate for the governorship. My work and hers have brought this about, to name but two.’ He nodded at Xaraea, but she had her head down, in respect for her leaders, and did not notice.

‘What do you bring down upon us here, Wasp-kinden?’ said another of the Skryres. ‘We know your kind only too well.’

‘I bring the Emperor’s rule.’

‘And what does that imply?’ said the woman Skryre. Her tone suggested she was one step ahead of the conversation, knowing his answer already.

‘An interesting question,’ he allowed. ‘The Empire is only here for two reasons: one concerns the skirmish that happened months before Helleron was even taken, in which your people killed a few of our soldiers. The other is merely a happenstance of geography, since the Empire doesn’t miss out towns along the way. There is no more to it than that, nor any great burden on me – so I can be whatever kind of governor I like.’

She smiled thinly. ‘And what would you like, O Governor Tegrec? What is it you want from us?’

The words almost stuck in his throat, and glancing at Xaraea was no help to him. In the end he could not simply blurt it out. He had hidden his handicap for too long. ‘Do you see this woman here?’ he asked, indicating Raeka.

‘Your slave, we take her for,’ one of the other Skryres remarked. Tegrec had the sense of much conversation going on between them that he could not hear, as though they were Ant-kinden who could pass words silently and freely among themselves.

‘My slave, indeed. She goes everywhere with me and even sleeps at the foot of my bed. She is very useful, since she can read technical plans and evaluate siege artillery. She can fly orthopters and other such machines. There is one other reason, though, why she is so very essential to me. Can you imagine why?’

Although they made no sign of it, he was sure they already knew.

‘She opens doors for me. They all think that a great affectation of mine, but in fact it is to hide a certain handicap I must live with. She opens doors because, faced with locks and latches, I can make no sense of them. You understand me.’

The woman Skryre came forward, staring at him intently. ‘Yes, we see,’ she said. ‘You are Inapt.’

‘I am a freak amongst my own people,’ he confessed, without any rancour. ‘What they all take for granted, I can never be a part of. But there are compensations nonetheless. I was always a reader, as a child, and from that, once grown, I passed on to stranger matters. In my library I had several tomes acquired at the start of the Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal: books my kin could never comprehend, but I could.’

‘You are a seer,’ the Skryre confirmed, so matter-of-factly, but it was an endorsement he had not been sure of ever receiving. ‘You have taught yourself, then, from books?’

‘From books, from Dragonfly prisoners, by whatever other means were to hand. And then the conquest of Tharn was spoken of, even before we had taken Helleron, and soon I began to touch on agents of your factor Xaraea here. From there it was a matter of making sure my name was coupled with Tharn’s at every turn, and so, between your woman and myself…’ He smiled. ‘Here I am, a major at thirty, and the Governor of Tharn.’

‘We shall not remain within your Empire long,’ said one of the Skryres, ‘Or at least so the majority of our futures show us. Either we shall be free or we shall be destroyed. The future you propose is but a thin thread in the weaving.’

‘State your terms,’ the female Skryre demanded.

Tegrec spread his hands. ‘I see no reason to impose any more on you than I must. A small garrison, for what more would be needed amid such a peaceful folk; some pittance of taxation too, for the Emperor is greedy for such things. Beside that, nothing needs to change. Continue to rule yourselves and your lives as you always have.’

‘As we always have,’ echoed one of the Skryres, in a sick tone of voice. ‘You have no idea of always, Wasp-kinden.’

‘Then teach me,’ Tegrec said, standing up at last. ‘I have come with an open mind. I have come thirsty for knowledge. I know you have taken students from other kinden before, though never from mine, but there has never been a Wasp like me before. Teach me, then, and make me one of you, and in return I shall shield you from the Empire. If you doubt me, then look within me – as I know you can, as I myself have even done with others.’

They exchanged glances, and then one asked Xaraea, ‘Your spies, your agents, what do they say?’

‘There are no certainties,’ she said. ‘But what choice have we?’