Heirs of the Blade

Nineteen

She heard the footsteps. She was still awake past midnight, on this night of all nights. How had she known? There was no explaining it, but a premonition had needled her and jabbed her, and filled her stomach with sinking dread – a premonition that the end of her little world was coming.

She was Seda, youngest daughter of the Wasp Emperor, a child of eight years old.

The footsteps were in no hurry. There was shouting elsewhere in the palace, but the man, that death-handed man, idled down the corridor towards their door. She sat up in her bed. Distantly, someone was cursing. Distantly, there was weeping, fighting. Slave sounds usually, but somehow she knew that it was free men and women who now wept and fought, on this particular night.

She slipped out of her bed, shivering, her bare feet cold on the stone. It was always cold here, the sun’s fleeting warmth stolen away as quickly as it came, but there was a deeper cold now, and it came with those footsteps.

She knew who was approaching and what he intended. She knew what had happened: the terrible event that had hung in the balance for three days, and now was done.

Father? But he was dead, of course. His death had brought the footsteps.

Eight years old and intelligent enough to know what had occurred, and what must follow. For a moment she considered the window, but she had no Art to climb or fly with.

Stripped of any options, she hunched down at her own bedside, hearing the footsteps stop at the door of her room.

In the bed across from hers, her brother Tarvec stirred, but slept on.

She retreated and retreated, but the only place to go was beneath the bed. When she had been very young, she had believed, after a vivid nightmare, that a creature dwelt there – red-eyed and its mouthparts honed into a long, hollow stiletto – waiting for her to sleep so that it could drink her blood. Now the space beneath the bed became her refuge, for the monsters were already abroad.

The door opened. There had been guards posted outside. Perhaps they still stood there, but they made no attempt to hinder the footsteps coming into the room.

Tap, tap, tap. Army-issue boots approached the side of her bed, and she pictured him staring at the thrown-back blanket. She tried not to breathe, tried to summon up some of the hiding Art that some of the lesser kinden practised. Go away. There is nothing for you here.

Then he was crouching, and she could not but open her eyes and look into his face. It was not a bad face, in itself: a Wasp-kinden man with receding, greying hair. A soldier, like so many others. An officer. Her father’s friend.

But not today. She pressed herself back against the wall, as far from him as she could get, and jabbed an empty palm out towards him, as though she possessed the stinging Art that had made her people the greatest kinden in the world. She was only eight, though, and not so very precocious as all that. The intruder’s face merely twisted in dry humour.

She heard Tarvec stirring, sitting up, her brother asking, ‘Maxin, what-?’

Maxin’s face vanished from her view as he stood up, and she heard the sharp crackle of his sting, a truncated exclamation as Tarvec died.

Then Maxin was kneeling to peer at her again. Was he making a decision on his own, or recalling instructions given to him by that other brother, her eldest brother – the one about to assume the throne.

The Rekef officer stood up again and she heard his footsteps cross the room. She breathed a little easier, because now she remembered how the rest of the dream went. He would go and murder her other siblings, a second brother and two other sisters, so that, out of the Emperor Alvdan the First’s progeny, only the eldest boy and youngest girl would survive the night. Over the next tenday, eleven other Wasp-kinden – children or young men and women – would also die for the crime of having a mother whom the Emperor had found beguiling. Twenty-nine halfbreeds of various part-Wasp ancestries would follow them. Maxin was as thorough as the late Emperor had been lustful.

Then the third Emperor of the Wasps would take the throne, ushering in a new era.

She was so lost in this recollection that she almost failed to notice how the footsteps had not left the room. Maxin was standing at the doorway, and she knew he was looking back towards her.

A few hammering heartbeats before he moved again. He was coming back. But it hadn’t been like this. He had gone off about his bloody-handed business, she recalled. But now he had changed his mind? Not for General Maxin the restricting bonds of history. This time he would guarantee his new Emperor’s eternal reign by killing the only remaining threat to his power.

She was already screaming when he reached the bed, screaming as he dragged her out from under it, pushing her back towards the window with a hand about her throat. He was older now, with lines of cruelty and ambition written across his face which were the wages of eight years of service to the man he had made Emperor. He was just how she remembered him.

In the centre of the storm of terror wheeling about inside her head there remained one constant point, and she struggled for it like a swimmer in deep water. Just how I remember you? But if you will be that man, then let us renew our old acquaintance, Maxin.

With a great effort, she cast off her eight-year-old self enough to find the fabric of the dream around her and wrench at it, using strength without finesse. Give me visions, will you? Then I shall have some of my own.

The face of Maxin twisted and leered before her, and his grip was tight about her throat. With a fierce lunge of her will, she conjured hands on his shoulders, dragging him off her. In a moment she had squirmed from his grasp, watching the hated Rekef general hauled away by the two protectors that she had conjured from her own mind and pressed into service. Only one of them had been present for the real Maxin’s death, but it pleased her to have the two of them side by side: Thalric, her regent, and Brugan, her new Lord General of the Rekef.

For a moment she found herself fighting back and forth for control, sensing the dream world all around her try to suborn her new agents, to make the two newcomers a part of the same nightmare. But they were new, and reacting to the new was most definitely not the strong point of Khanaphes.

Thalric had arched General Maxin over with a knee in the small of the man’s back, thrusting his arms outwards so that Maxin could not sting. She saw Brugan’s knife glint just as it had when the real Maxin had met his end.

‘Hold,’ she commanded, because if this was to be her dream, she would rip all the joy she could from it. She approached the straining Maxin, with her palm held out, watching him physically diminish, from ogre to a wretched old man weeping for mercy.

She took a deep breath and summoned her Art, and then her hand was blazing, again and again, the bolts of golden fire striking Maxin over and over, searing and crisping the flesh of his face, smashing its way into his skull.

She recognized another trap here: she could become just as lost in hollow triumphs as she could in terrors. So, instead, she turned away, banished it all from her mind and faced her unseen audience.

Are you satisfied? she asked the invisible watchers, and stepped out from the dream.

Che had a moment of clarity then, because she had been there herself: not with Maxin and the knife, but experiencing a horror that was personal to her. She had broken away from it, just as the Wasp Empress had done, which must mean…

And now she saw that well-remembered hall, high-ceilinged, with its pillars sculpted into surreal abominations blending the human and the insect. Braziers of blue-green fire leapt and guttered and, where Che herself had stood not so long ago, there was a single figure: Seda, supreme ruler of the Wasps.

An old man was curled up at her feet, and she knelt beside him, laying a hand on his shoulder and speaking softly until he twitched and cried out, as he escaped from whatever personal torment he also had been suffering. As with Che before her, Seda rescued her companion from the nightmares of the Masters of Khanaphes.

And Che heard the words in Seda’s mind, her private thoughts: It is just as I remember it, from the dream.

A sense of dislocation paralysed her. Who is dreaming, then? Was she with me all the way, when I came here before. Is she even now watching me watch her? When is this happening?

Only when Gjegevey was able to regain his feet did Seda even spare a glance for the grand figures that towered over her. Three of them had come there to put her to the test: two women and a man, their voluptuous figures naked and clad only in a thin curtain of glistening slime. Che knew them well, their kinden and as individuals. These were the ancient Slug-kinden whose hands had guided the other peoples of the world out of the darkness of barbarism, or so they claimed. They had raised their great city of Khanaphes to be a wonder of the world. They had lived through the long days of their power, before the records of any save perhaps the Moths, who remembered a great deal else they never spoke of. When the great Inapt powers – the Spiders and Mosquitos and Moth-kinden – were struggling for dominance in that long-ago world, the Masters of Khanaphes were already in decline, their city subsiding into history as they retreated from a drying earth and the harsh sun, into the refuge of these subterranean crypts. Whether or not they were once the great lords and patrons of the world as they claimed, was lost to time, but one thing Che was sure of: within their own domain they preserved much of the ancient magic of the Days of Lore, which elsewhere had fled before the coming of the modern world.

And Seda stared them in the eye. ‘Enough games,’ said the Empress of the Wasps.

Thalric gazed out over the irregular hills that had been cut into steps for agriculture long ago, and repaired every year by a chain of farmers, father to son, following traditions that had been ancient before the Wasp-kinden ever dreamt of Empire.

‘That’s it, then?’

‘Well, maps bicker, but just about,’ Varmen confirmed. They were in the Commonweal now: the sovereign realm of the Monarch of the Dragonflies, and no longer just the pirated Principalities that had become such a twisted hybrid of two hostile cultures.

Skelling had turned back now, his business done. He had simply moved the draught insect from one end of his boat to the other, and the barge was already out of sight, leaving Thalric here where he had wanted to go.

But that, of course, was not really true. It was Che who had wanted to get here. It had been her plan, entirely. Thalric had no fond memories of the Commonweal, and he rather suspected that it had none of him either.

At first Che had been so full of talk about rescuing her sister, and then later about magic, and even about the Empress – though that was a subject Thalric had no wish to dwell on. She had carried him along with her because she had possessed a purpose, whereas he had none of his own. And because he had grown fond of her, and because they had more in common than he had with either his kin or kinden. From the interrogation chambers of Myna to the tombs of Khanaphes, they had grown close.

He knelt beside her, trying to see some clue that would help him unravel her, but she remained a mystery. She had not woken again since after the attack on the barge. She barely seemed to breathe. He had no way to help her, or even to understand what was wrong.

Varmen had not departed, not yet. He and his uncomplaining little pack-beetle were forever on the point of heading off, but somehow each new dawn saw him still hanging around.

Che refused to eat. Thalric had managed to force a little water down her, but surely not enough to keep her alive. Instead, whatever was holding her in this unconscious state seemed to be sustaining her as well. That was yet another thing he could not understand.

‘Suon Ren,’ he murmured. ‘That’s where she was heading.’

‘Principality of Roh. East of here. Canals go to it,’ Varmen explained.

Thalric looked at him almost with annoyance. ‘How do you know? Why would you know a thing like that?’

‘Been three times in the Commonweal now, since the war. You pick stuff up.’ Varmen shrugged. ‘Besides, I remember when we were marching on Shon Fhor, just before all that trouble back home kicked off and we ended up with that treaty. I was a sergeant, so I got to see the maps sometimes. We were going to surround Shon Fhor and scoop the Monarch out like eating an oyster, and the Fourth were going to press on south of the lake, to Suon Ren, and finish off taking the principality. ’Stead of which, everything fell apart round Maynes way. We lost our supply line, and wiser heads reckoned we’d bitten off enough for now on. Always wondered why we didn’t come back here, instead of all that Lowlands business.’

‘Rise of the Engineers and the merchants,’ Thalric told him.

Varmen raised an eyebrow, baffled.

‘Commonweal pickings were all very well, lots of art, some decent treasure, more slaves than anyone knew what to do with, but the Lowlands is rich. They had artifice and knowledge that exceeded our own, industry, real money. Once the Consortium and the Engineering Corps got their way, the Lowlander invasion was inevitable.’

‘Goes to show you shouldn’t be too clever, eh?’ Varmen grunted, seeming much amused, then he pointed suddenly. ‘She moved!’

Thalric was instantly over beside Che again, seeing her eyelids flutter. He spoke her name three times, but only when he tried the full ‘Cheerwell’ did she frown and twitch, and then stare up at him.

‘Thalric?’

‘Che, tell me what’s happening.’ He didn’t like the hint of fear in his own voice, but there was no helping that.

‘Thalric… I was in Khanaphes, with her -’

‘Che, that doesn’t help me.’

Abruptly she was clinging to him, as though about to be swept away at any moment. ‘Thalric, it’s not over. I can still feel her there. I’m falling back. Thalric, this is magic – you have to believe me. This is old magic, and I’ve got myself into it, and I don’t know what to do.’

‘I believe you.’ His words came out without thinking, and it was almost a relief to cast off his responsibility for the situation by admitting such.

‘Suon Ren,’ Che told him urgently. ‘Salma’s father – foster-father – will have a magician at his court. He must! You can trust him.’

‘Che, not without you there to make the introductions,’ Thalric replied sharply. ‘What can I say to him? That I’m the man who enslaved his son, and whose people killed him? I won’t be welcome-’

‘He will have to understand,’ she gasped. He could feel her trembling violently, trying to brace herself against him as though a great tide was building up, ready to tear her away. ‘There is no one else. Please… I need help, Thalric. Please help me.’

‘Che, this is insane-’

But she cried out, wrapping her arms about him and, despite himself, he felt the moment when the invisible wave caught hold of her and ripped her away from him. So that, even though her body remained limp in his grasp, Che was gone again, fallen back into whatever abyss she had briefly clawed her way out of.

He laid her back down, scowling furiously, aware that Varmen was watching him, but not wanting to see the other Wasp’s expression.

‘You’ll be wanting to hop one of the locals’ barges, then,’ was all the man said.

‘They’d take me?’

Varmen shrugged. ‘Can’t hurt to ask. Maybe they’ll try to kill us, or maybe they’ll make us their new kings, who knows?’

‘Us?’ Thalric looked at him then.

The former Sentinel was sitting with one hand draped companionably across the pack-beetle’s back. When he saw Thalric’s scrutiny he shrugged, almost embarrassed. ‘Can’t see you manhandling the poor girl all that way on your own, even if you did hop a barge.’

‘And I thought you wanted me dead, because I was Rekef?’

‘Oh, you? Just don’t press your luck, is all I’ll say. She seems decent enough, though.’ Varmen smiled. ‘Wouldn’t have thought I’d find a Rekef man so caught up with one of the lesser kinden.’ His grin broadened as Thalric rounded on him, rising to the bait. ‘Don’t take offence at that, Rekef. We all need something to keep us human, right?’

The Masters of Khanaphes regarded Seda stonily.

‘Little Empress,’ said one of the women, ‘we know why you have come. You have been expected.’

‘Really?’ Seda replied. ‘And yet I feel anything but welcome.’

‘Do you think that what you seek here should be easy?’ the man asked acidly. ‘We have hoarded our power for a thousand years, so would you resent us taking steps to discourage the unworthy?’

Seda gave a hard smile, gazing up at them amid the leaping, bluish light. ‘Tell me why I am here, then?’

‘You are here to learn,’ the other woman told her.

‘It is creditable.’ The first nodded slowly. ‘You have discovered in yourself the last drop of magic known to your people, but you do not know what to do with it. You have been diligent in seeking enlightenment, until it has led you to us, the first lords and ladies of mankind. You wish to learn from us.’ They spoke softly, the Masters of Khanaphes, but their words created vast echoes that resounded – felt but unheard – about the cavernous spaces of this, their resting place. She was at the heart of it here, now, where all the remnants of ancient power had been hoarded and husbanded. Her body thrilled to it, telling her that she belonged here at their feet, as their humblest slave and servant, if only they would consent to let her know…

Seda nodded along with those thoughts. She saw Gjegevey staring at her worriedly, and wondered what it was she had woken him from. What constituted a Woodlouse nightmare?

When he saw that he had caught her eye, the old man shook his head. He must feel the leaden weight of their power and of all the ages they had stored up here. If they extended their hand to him, she mused, then perhaps he would already be kneeling before them in obeisance.

They were leaning on her, perhaps without even intending to, pressuring her into following the path that they had already set out. No doubt they could not even imagine her saying no. Their confidence in her eventual decision was complete.

Was almost complete. For, of course, she – the other one who had stood here and also been given this choice – she had refused.

And I do not kneel. Not even before the Masters of Khanaphes.

‘I think you underestimate the extent of my studies,’ she declared. Seeing their disdainful expressions, she added quickly, ‘Oh, Masters, I cannot pretend to match your many centuries. I can only guess at your long histories that the turning of the ages has overwritten. No doubt, when the world was young, you held the reins of power and the other kinden clustered around your feet like children. Perhaps, after that, you idled on your thrones while young races, those that we now think of as ancient and occult, squabbled for the scraps from your tables. Certainly I cannot guess how many centuries have passed since you last truly stirred yourselves or exercised your power. Until the Scorpions came to lay waste your city, that is, and you were forced to it. And which hand set those barbarians at your gates, if not my Empire’s? Who could have then guessed what Brugan’s foolishness would unearth?’

Her own words did not raise the same great, soundless echoes that theirs did. They raised only sharp, real echoes, that whiplashed across the faces of the Masters, for nobody had ever addressed to them in such a manner since the dawn of time.

‘I am not here to learn,’ she explained, speaking into the ringing silence. ‘I am not here to sit at your feet and be satisfied with whatever pittance you grant me. I am the Empress of the Wasps, and I am no mere subject, not even for the first lords and ladies of mankind. You know what I am here for.’

There were more of them appearing now, their huge figures striding towards her between the pillars. They eyed her impassively, arrogantly, but she stared them down. And do I detect the faintest quiver of doubt?

Then one of the men sighed heavily and said, ‘We are sorry that you have come such a way only for this. To stand before the Masters of Khanaphes and dare to make demands is only foolishness.’ He did not sound angry, though, just disappointed. Even so, she felt a surge of their power building up, inexorable as an earthquake, readying itself to blot her out so utterly that the world would not even remember her name.

‘Such promise,’ one of the women murmured. ‘She could have learned so much of our histories, such as no savage has ever known, and now this… Such a waste…’

‘Majesty.’ Gjegevey’s voice quavered, and Seda realized that he was terrified almost out of his mind. Had he been here alone, he would have thrown himself before the Masters and begged for mercy, but she gave him strength and for her sake, for loyalty’s sake, he clung to his staff and held his ground.

Several of the Masters were already turning away, not even interested enough to witness her being destroyed. The looming tidal wave of their power – a slightest handful of all they had saved up here, and yet still so much, such a vast fist to crush such small flies – was cresting all around them.

‘You have your grand histories,’ Seda conceded, betraying nothing but cool arrogance in her voice and stance. ‘But I have an Empire.’

She could sense their amusement at such a proclamation, and it bought her a little more time – time to educate those who had thought she had come to serve them.

‘At the lightest gesture of my army, half your city was razed. It would take a fraction of the soldiers now under my command to obliterate it from the face of the world. If I do not return safely to them, then that is exactly what I will do. More, they will bring in machines and Mole Cricket-kinden and they will dig. They shall tear apart the earth itself, until they uncover these halls, and then the sun shall become your only ceiling, and for all your power, and however many of my subjects you slay or drive mad, they shall take you eventually, and lead you through the streets of Capitas in chains. And so your histories, all of your histories, shall come to an end. I shall tear up every stone that bears your name or your likeness, and then I shall salt the earth itself so that your power may never revive.’

She sensed the massive hammer of their will poised in delicate balance above her.

‘You cannot think-’ one of them began, but Seda did not let him finish.

‘If you harm me, then this shall come to pass. It shall come to pass even if you simply deny me. I am the Empress of the Wasps, and I am the inheritor of the ancient powers, by blood and by shadow, and there is only one thing I require from you. Grant that one thing, and I shall leave you to your darkness and your stone.’

This was the fulcrum moment on which the future hinged, with their power poised right above her, an invisible, irresistible weight that could crush her mind, send her stark mad, and none of her tricks of magic or statesmanship could withstand it. But we are Wasps, and we do not beg. I shall have this on my terms or not at all, for there is no other path fit for an Empress.

Gjegevey stood very close, almost clinging to her arm, his face sheened with sweat in this unwholesome blue light. She radiated strength, though. Even if, at her greatest, she seemed a mere gnat in the face of their might, she stood straight and defied them, and held firm to her demands.

Had it not been for that other woman, had it not been for those stolen dreams that had visited Seda so long ago, so far away – those dreams of the same echoing halls, the lamps, the solemn faces of the Masters – then she would have sucumbed. True, had it not been for those dreams she would never have come at all, but in that moment of crisis, facing the vast depths of the Masters’ strength, she still held to that one scrap of knowledge. They were defeated before, out-thought, tricked from their prey. The Beetle girl escaped them. Well, I shall go one better.

‘See my Empire,’ she told them, and then filled her own mind with it, all of its artifice and energy, its rapacious hunger, its unending hordes of soldiers, its fierce youthful fire. She summoned up all her own confidence, her belief in her people and in herself, and her unbridled and all-consuming need to control: to control herself, control her people, control the ancient powers, control the world. She did not know it, but she was grinning at them like a monster. She smiled like a tyrant and, just as their ancient power had weighed on her with its demands of Worship us! so she turned her mind on them with all the force of her Imperial will: Submit to me!

The air was full of soundless fury, of invisible fire, so that Gjegevey flinched from every moment of it. But in the physical world a great silence had fallen, and Seda’s grin simply widened, and the Masters were suddenly uncertain. The world of the new and the vital was brought here before them, incomprehensible and threatening.

And, at the very last, an answer: ‘What is it that you want, then?’ said one of the women. ‘Name it.’

‘Validation,’ Seda told them. ‘Confirmation. You, with your great legacy, must accept me as your heir in the modern world. Just a nod, Masters – just the smallest nod. All of us here know how power is defined by such symbols.’ She caught a glimpse of Gjegevey’s face, and he was wide-eyed in horror, but she had come too far now to turn aside. ‘Pass on to me the mantle,’ she insisted.

The Masters of Khanaphes, and there were many more of them now, exchanged slow glances, and Seda knew that thoughts must be passing between them, not by Art or even magic, but by virtue of their having spent so many centuries in each other’s company.

‘You claim to be the heir to the Age of Lore,’ one said at last, and when Seda nodded impatiently, added, ‘You wish us to crown you, to acknowledge you.’

‘You are the first-ever great magicians,’ Seda declared. ‘I will have you name me as your successor.’

‘And are you prepared to share your throne?’ asked another woman there.

Seda’s eyes narrowed. ‘With you?’

There was a murmur of laughter amongst them, more evident in the eyes than from anything she actually heard. ‘You shall never be our peer, little Empress, but perhaps you are fit to be named queen of what scant magic this withered age still owns. With our blessing you might do great things – might even turn back the sands a little and bring back some shadow of the old days. We cannot bless you, though, unless we also bless your sister.’

The Wasp Empress stared at her, and it was a few moments before she could form the words: ‘I have no sister. Maxin killed them all, years ago. I am the last of my blood.’

At her bafflement, the amusement among the Masters spread. ‘She was not born your kin, but she is your sister now. You and she were bloodied by the same thorn. In the instant that you attained your power, she came to hers. And, though her understanding is behind yours, you are yet walking in her footsteps.’

Seda glared at them all. ‘Explain yourselves!’ she demanded.

‘You have dreamt of these halls of ours,’ another of the Masters interposed. ‘But your sister was here before you. She broke our spells and made demands of us, though she was not so ambitious as you. You are joined, you and she, and though we bless you and grant you our acknowledgement, yet we must grant her nothing less. Your lives are intertwined, but only one of you can triumph in the end. You have a rival, Little Empress, and she is watching you even now.’

Che jerked back, trying to escape from the dream, trying to be anywhere but that subterranean tomb as the Wasp Empress glanced furiously about. I am not here, she had to remind herself. This is just a vision. This is nothing -

Seda’s eyes found hers, and there was a physical jolt of recognition and enmity between them, whereupon Che stopped lying to herself.

‘I see her,’ the Wasp growled, and she thrust out a hand towards Che, as though to sting her across the hundreds of miles that separated them. There came no searing light and heat, though, and Che was just beginning to relax when Seda bared her teeth in a savage snarl, and a wave of darkness pulsed out from her, faster than any eye could follow. Che had only a moment to register its approach before she was struck. Then a hammerblow of the mind detached her from her disembodied viewpoint and cast her far away, down into endless night.