Heirs of the Blade

Epilogue

Capitas: some months before

Since the business with the Mosquito-kinden, the great and the good of Capitas had begun to look forward to the Empress Seda’s welcoming of new ambassadors. Whether she charmed or whether she punished them, she was equally entertaining, as good as a visit to the fighting pits. This, she knew, was how the court felt. Returned from Khanaphes and on her own throne again, she gauged the mood around her, noting with amusement the swelled numbers of courtiers eager to see her latest reception.

But they were the Empire, or at least a certain face of it, the powerful and the ambitious whose desires she yoked to haul her Empire forward. She had divided and wooed them, played favourites, cast down, raised up, and always she had walked with the knives of the Rekef in her shadow. There was no union or alliance of them strong enough to bring her down, not for the moment.

She was aware of how most of them looked at her. She had won them, for now. She was a woman more Wasp-kinden than her brother had ever been. She met the world head-on. She was fierce when ferocity was needed, cunning as required, and when she punished, her abrupt sentences were often carried out before the whole court, less a lesson than a spectacle. She thought that they loved her most of all for that. There was an arbitrariness to her – the one thing she shared with her late brother – that well became a master of the Empire.

For these qualities, they forgave her a few foibles, such as the mystics and Inapt scholars she kept about the court. After all, even the Wasp-kinden had to admit that the Moths and their ilk had ruled the world centuries before, had been great powers in an age when Wasp history was not even being written down. What other great power of the modern world had seen their ambassadors come so meekly and humbly? Was there a Lowlander merchant prince or Assembler who could boast the same?

And now she had some new visitors, and she reclined on the throne to watch as they were escorted through the great doors at the far end of the chamber.

They were three men, all in full armour, and although they must have been aware of the unfriendly attention of the whole room, they made a brave show by marching in step, the last of them bearing a banner sloping across one shoulder: a simple checked field in familiar colours. The style of their mail was familiar to most of her court, or certainly those in active service a decade before: curved plates of chitin overlaying silk and leather and fine chainmail, in shapes elegant and graceful, and slightly too extravagant for an Imperial armourer’s more practical tastes. Where the spectators might have expected scintillating greens and blues and reds, though, all three wore identical colours, segments painted over or enamelled, and the leader’s breastplate newly wrought, so that the chitin’s sparkling finish was resplendent in their colours: black and gold.

They had bunches of moth-antennae plumes, cloaks lined with butterfly scales, torcs of gold and mother of pearl. These Dragonfly-kinden had clearly gone to great pains to impress, unaware that in the Empire such excess would seem quaint and barbaric. As they progressed towards the throne, presenting a study in pride and defiance, they were followed by an undercurrent of derision and mockery. What did they think they were, these savages decked in the livery of Empire? Was this some kind of joke?

‘Speak.’ Seda’s voice rang out, halting them. ‘What do you bring before me?’

There was a small exchange of sidelong glances between the two at the rear, but their leader knelt without hesitation. His brow gleamed a little with sweat, and Seda saw him swallow away a dry throat before he announced, ‘Your Imperial Majesty, accept me as your servant General Torste Sain, here to bring you word of the Principalities.’

At his proclaimed rank, a tide of laughter welled up, and an eddy of angry calls for the crossed pikes, amid jeers and threats. Seda held the gaze of Torste Sain the Dragonfly general, noticing his jaw clench and his shoulders hunch, as though readying himself for the rod.

She stood up abruptly and the room went silent, waiting for the Imperial verdict and for the downfall of these strange visitors. Instead, she turned her gaze upon her own court, and few enough of them dared meet her eyes the way the Dragonfly had.

‘How dare you mock?’ she demanded, not loudly, but sharply enough to reach the back of the room. ‘What do you find here that is worthy of your humour? Is there a general of our Empire who would dare to stand thus in the heart of a foreign state, facing every expectation of a swift execution? Would any of you risk your lives in the halls of the Spider-kinden Aristoi, or the royal court of some hostile Ant city-state?’ Torste Sain was regarding her impassively, so she invited him, ‘General, speak to us of the Principalities.’

At her words the kneeling Dragonfly stood up in a single smooth motion. ‘Great Majesty,’ he announced, ‘I am sent from the Principalities as a humble messenger. Since the borders of Empire shifted, you must know how we have been beset on all sides by the Commonweal to the west, by Myna and its allies to the east. We have had to forge ourselves a new state from the pieces that were left to us, guided by those of your people who remained and being taught the ways of Empire by your former servants. It is with joy that my people have learned the power of the new, Highness. I am proud to bear the rank of general, for I am the first of my kinden ever to do so.’ And he was indeed proud, it was plain to see. Seda wondered if any Wasp-kinden within living memory had felt that honour quite so keenly.

‘And do you seek to rejoin the Empire, General?’ she asked softly.

Taking a deep breath, he braced himself. ‘Your Highness, no.’

There might have been a uproar then, but her outstretched hands rendered it stillborn.

The general’s two companions were standing markedly closer together now, but he himself had not moved. ‘We honour the Empire,’ he stated. ‘There is no need to take what can be freely given. We shall have tribute for your treasury, Highness. We shall have soldiers to fight alongside your armies. We ask only for recognition as your friends and protection against our mutual enemies.’

This time she let the protests run a little longer, because there were many traditionalists still in her court, and the Empire had always recognized only two classes of geography: those parts of the map already in black and gold, and those parts yet to be painted. That mentality had served well enough to let a single hill tribe swallow up its kindred neighbours, and then put a score of other cities in chains. But the times have changed.

‘The word you seek is “protectorate”,’ she declared, and her court quietened quickly, because speaking over the Empress was seldom forgiven. She looked around at them all, seeing plenty there of shock and outrage, with the old guard ready to decry the insurrection of the Principalities’ Wasp-kinden, and to call for the subjugation of pretenders such as this Torste Sain. There were other expressions to be read too, though. There were thoughtful Consortium merchants, calculating tacticians, scholars of recent history and politics, Beetle-kinden diplomats and agents of the Rekef Outlander. They were thinking as she was thinking, using a logic that had nothing to do with Apt or Inapt.

‘Consider Collegium in the Lowlands,’ she urged her court. ‘How is it that Collegium is not beneath our flag already? Because Collegium never stands alone. When we fought Collegium, we were also fighting Tharn, the Spiderlands, the Sarnesh, Solarno and the Commonweal, not to mention the rebellions in Myna and Szar which Collegiate agents incited. That is how Collegium staved us off.’ She gifted them with a smile fierce as the sun. ‘You have all seen the statue that stands within the palace doors. Who are the defenders who stand at my back there? Soldier, artificer, merchant and diplomat. Wars are won by more weapons than swords and snapbows and artillery. General Torste, the Empire is glad to recognize its errant children, and to extend to them a hand of friendship and protection, and in return, and with our aid, you shall guard our border with the Commonweal, whose stratagems your people are best placed to understand. And when we march on the Lowlands once more, when we stand before the gates of Collegium, you shall be with us to see it, and this time we shall not turn away.’

Capitas: Now

There had been many changes in Capitas over the last few years. It was the Empire in miniature, and the Empire had been forced to deal with a great deal of turmoil since the strength of its armies had broken at Collegium and Sarn, Myna and Solarno and elsewhere. The ill-educated, within the Empire and without, claimed that the death of the Emperor had been the blow that rocked the Empire, but just as the death of a general would not halt an Imperial army, so the death of Alvdan II would have been nothing but a footnote in history, if only his armies and his battle plans had been sounder.

After the end of the external war had come the internal: renegade governors refusing to acknowledge Seda, setting themselves up as their own masters. The Empire had teetered on the brink of a disintegration that would have taken it back to its feuding tribal origins of three generations before.

That the Empire had survived to regain its territory and its strength was due to two saviours. One was embodied in Seda, her sharp mind and her adroit handling of both her allies and her enemies ensuring that she was never forced into a position from which only force could extricate her. The second saving factor was the other kinden, the Wasps’ second-class citizens.

There had always been a fair number of Beetle- and Fly-kinden in the Empire, and they were counted Imperials of a sort, not as good as Wasps but better than the rest. While the Wasp-kinden ran their armies, the Beetles and Flies tended to find work as clerks and merchants and administrators, and when the Empire had cracked apart, they had stepped into the breach. The efficiency of the Consortium of the Honest, of the Quartermaster Corps, the Engineers, the Capitas bureaucracy, had proved the glue that held the Empire together, and that was able to re-join each piece seamlessly. No demands were made, no threats, but by the end of the insurrection there was a notable number of influential Beetles and Flies who had found promotion and power, as well as the covert gratitude of the Empress.

But there was more than that. The doomsayers had predicted a hundred revolts, every enslaved city striving for its freedom. In truth, except for the cities of the West-Empire – Szar, Maynes and Myna in their new Alliance – the majority of the cities to rise up were those whose governors had forced the issue. The enemies of the Empress had turned out to be other ambitious Wasps rather than her subject peoples. There had been a few attempted rebellions, but most of the subject cities had otherwise simply gone about their business. In the aftermath, Seda made sure to reward both governors and slave-subjects for their loyalty, just as she had punished treachery without mercy or hesitation.

One result of this new mood within the Empire was that Capitas’s citizens were taking a keener interest in the subjects of their Empire, which in turn had led to the founding of the Imperial Museum. It was a Collegiate concept of course, though the Lowlander Beetles preferred exhibits representing the domains of the historian, naturalist or artificer. The Imperial Museum was just that: a museum of the Empire. The building itself was still being constructed, half of its halls and wings still just foundations surmounted by the skeletons of scaffolding, but the completed sections had already seen a brisk trade of fascinated Wasp-kinden come to learn more about their slaves and servants.

There was a Bee-kinden wing, where artefacts from the city of Vesserett were on display: their graceful yet functional carving, their elegant illustrated scrolls, all the trappings of their emergent power from the days in which they had been the nascent Empire’s first challenge. There was a hall of Grasshopper-kinden art from Sa, where slave musicians would play on certain days. There was a cellar tricked out to look like a Mole Cricket-kinden dwelling from Delve. There were three halls devoted to the Commonweal, one lined with the swords and armour of two score Dragonfly nobles, all of it recovered during the war, and many displaying the damage that had done for their original owners. The Wasp-kinden strolled through these rooms and learned a little about those far-flung cultures, those disparate peoples, but most of all they learned how they were superior because these things were all the spoils of conquest. It was the same lesson as taught by the deaths of foreign combatants in the arena, but more lasting.

The Empress herself had made her fondness for this establishment widely known, and the Beetle-kinden Consortium family who were behind it had been richly rewarded. It was well known, indeed, that after dark, when the museum was locked up, she would use its empty halls to speak to those who had particularly attracted her notice. It was, everyone knew, a sign of great favour.

Her companion tonight was one Major Karrec, a man of good family and good standing in the Consortium. As she paced the length of the Commonweal hall, the vacant helms of fallen nobles regarding her gravely from either side, he regaled her with stories of his war exploits and his cleverness in the face of the enemy. He was a man of middle height, running slightly to fat from a life far from rigorous, but there was a spark about him, she thought. As there should be.

Behind the two of them, a pair of her Mantis-kinden bodyguards paced silently, the metal claws of their gauntlets folded back.

He smiled at her, did Karrec, and walked closer than was appropriate, and she realized that he was crossing that old familiar line, as she thought he might. As the Empress, on high, she was only female in the abstract, but if she allowed her underlings any familiarity, then some of them would begin to treat her as women had always been treated in the Empire: as something to be possessed and controlled.

As they reached the end of the hall, Karrec stopped and stared. He had been discoursing on some of the suits of mail, obviously familiar with the exhibits, but now he frowned. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, forgive me. I don’t recall a hall beyond this one.’

‘It is not for public viewing yet, Major,’ she said sweetly. ‘However, I have asked our curators to open it tonight, just for us.’

He was encouraged by that, she saw, and she wondered just how deluded he might be about his prospects. Still, it was all to her advantage, so she let him dream while he could.

The chamber beyond was small compared with the museum’s other halls, a simple box of a room that seemed as though it had been left to moulder for decades, until the walls had grown a patina of mould and lichen, the plaster decaying and falling away to turn the smooth surfaces into a maze of canyons and eroded topography, all of it made to shiver and move under the light of two ensconced torches. Karrec was not quite so oblivious as to take that sight in his stride, and he hesitated in the doorway, until she turned back and smiled at him.

‘A remarkable effect, yes? I understand the craftsmen laboured at it for days.’

‘But what is it for?’ he asked, entering cautiously.

‘This is the Mantis-kinden hall,’ she explained. ‘It is small, as there are few such in the Empire, but they possess a fascinating culture nonetheless.’

He glanced back at the two guards, who had stopped at the doorway. ‘And they’re friends to the throne now, I see.’

‘Oh, they were gifts from the clever Moth-kinden of Tharn,’ she explained. ‘Half a dozen Mantis-kinden warriors to guard me from enemies both within and without the Empire. As if I would take such a gift unquestioned. Spies, of course, for their masters in the mountains, their loyalty already pledged before they were sent to kneel to me. However, I have shown them where their true path lies, so they are mine now.’ As Karrec would surely question that, she took up a torch and brought it over to her prize exhibit, hearing his astonished gasp. As a Consortium man, and a man of independent wealth, Karrec was a collector. She took it on faith that he would already be placing an exorbitant price on what she was showing him.

It was a suit of armour, full mail from the closed helm down to the boots. The closest equivalent still in use would be the heavy Sentinel plate that was even now being retired from the Imperial armies, but this had been fashioned for Sentinels of another age. Every piece had been made with loving care, backed by centuries of skill. The elegant curves and lines recalled the Dragonfly mail in the previous room, but their message was far less one of idle beauty. There was deadliness written in every line and edge of it, so that the helm glowered down at them and – even hanging at rest – the metal held itself in such a way as to suggest it was a moment from leaping forward and striking them both down. The ruddy torch flame flickered over it, picking out the ancient greens and russets as various shades of black.

The colours alone betrayed the compromise she had been forced to make. There was no sizeable Mantis-kinden hold in the Empire, and the kinden themselves did not ever sell their antique heirlooms. This suit had been pieced together from a half-dozen incomplete sets that were loot from the Twelve-year War or from the fall of the Felyal, then commandeered by the throne from the collections of the wealthy. It had been the best that she could do, even with all the resources of the Empire behind her, but here it was: the closest to a complete suit of Mantis-kinden Sentinel plate that any non-Mantis had ever owned, and in truth she guessed that precious few of them remained even in the hands of their original creators.

She saw Karrec’s forehead wrinkle suddenly and he observed, with the absorption of the true collector, ‘It’s incomplete.’ His hand approached the empty steel cuff where the right gauntlet was missing, but he did not touch.

‘For now,’ she admitted, ‘though not for long.’ She moved about the room until her torchlight flared up at the object positioned to face the armour. She heard Karrec give a startled hiss, and saw him recoil with a palm directed at the effigy.

‘Remarkable, is it not?’ she asked.

They had taken it from the Felyal in its entirety, although by the time it had reached Capitas the rot had turned parts of it to wood dust, and her bodyguards had become restorers, splicing in fresh wood to maintain the icon’s form, without ever quite removing the rot that was part of its essence. Eight feet tall and brushing the ceiling, it was a pillar carved unevenly with insect sigils: centipede and woodlouse and beetle grub, all the creatures of rot and renewal. It was built with two arms, arching out and then down, but even then the resemblance to a mantis was rudimentary. It should have been a thing of clumsy ugliness that the people of Capitas would come and laugh at, deriding the superstitions of the primitives. Instead, in torchlight and darkness, it had the brooding, malign presence of a living thing.

Karrec had backed a few paces towards the door, forgetting that two of her guard were still stationed there. Then she moved her torch a little, and another armoured form was revealed beside the wooden effigy. She saw him relax for a moment, and then freeze motionless, as the figure moved smoothly forward: another of her bodyguard, and a fourth from the icon’s far side, padding into the gloom towards Karrec.

He was not, in the end, quite the fool he had been playing. ‘Majesty, if I have offended you in any way…’ he began desperately, but she silenced him with a gesture.

‘Your crimes are well known to me,’ she said flatly. ‘That the gold of the Empire sticks to your fingers before it reaches our treasury, this is no rare thing in a Consortium man. That you have underlings who rob and kill for you, to swell your private collection, this is but ambition and no great transgression. That you have correspondents in Helleron to whom you over-boldly speak of Imperial affairs, well, you know little enough. What could you betray, even if you tried? None of these mere errors warrant a death sentence, Major.’

He stared at her, his throat working but no sound coming out, and the two Mantis-kinden seized his arms.

‘But nevertheless you will die,’ she told him softly, once his hands were secure and he was unable to sting. ‘Not for any fault of yours, but because my grandfather, Alvric the Great, first Emperor of the Wasps, was a man of broad-spread appetites, and because of that he was your grandfather, too. The blood of Empire runs in your veins, and a cruel old man taught me well that it is a currency which commands respect.’

He was protesting now, but the Mantis-kinden hauled him over to the effigy and, while one held him still, the other took long nails and hammered them home, pinning his arms within the carved grip. His screams echoed the length of the empty museum, until they finally cut his throat and collected the first of his blood in a chalice, which she took from them.

‘The glove,’ she instructed them, and noticed their moment of hesitation. In shedding blood they were quick as water, but this… they did not know whether she was right or wrong in this, whether it was high honour or high treason she was about. Like most of their kind, they feared magic, even as their whole culture had been trained to revere the old days when magic had walked freely over the world – before the Apt revolution.

Still, after she had returned from Khanaphes with the invisible brand on her brow, the mark of the Masters, they had given themselves over to her, heart and soul.

One of them knelt before her, presenting the object she had called for: a battered leather gauntlet with a short, vicious blade jutting from between the second and third finger, connected to a metal bar the wearer would grip, able to flex its killing point in and out: now standing straight, now folded back. The archetypal Mantis weapon, lethal beyond swords in the hands of a master, laughable when wielded by the untrained. But she had seen what it could do. She had been given a detailed and graphic lesson on just what carnage a man could wreak with such a thing.

She nodded, and the Mantis-kinden secured the glove to the armour’s empty cuff. She put a hand on the elegantly spined pauldrons, feeling the emptiness, a vacancy that went beyond a simple, unoccupied suit of mail, as though the breastplate enclosed a vast lonely abyss, and in its depths…

She sipped from the chalice, tasting Karrec’s blood. His life of small cruelties and petty selfishness had given it a bitter flavour, but there was a rich aftertaste there, his unknown heritage that she had parsed out. It was not that the Imperial bloodline was special in some objective way that an artificer could discern through analysis in glassware and measurement, but so long as an emperor or empress held sway, commanded the terror and the adoration of a hundred thousand and more, as long as the citizens of the Empire believed that blood and destiny rode side by side, then the blood of emperors was a power and currency in the magical realm of symbols and significances. It was a trick the Commonwealers, too, had mastered an age before, and then forgotten.

Almost gently she touched the lower rim of the Mantis-crafted helm and tipped it back, the empty visor staring at the ceiling. With a smooth motion, she emptied the chalice of Karrec’s blood into the helm, hearing it gush down into the further reaches of the armour.

No words, at first. She reached out, still reinventing the discipline she practised moment to moment. Had anything such as this been attempted for five hundred years? She felt not. Something urged her on, though, some spirit of the magical traditions she had been unwillingly initiated into: the twisted darkness of the Mantis-kinden leaching from the shattered Shadow Box of the Darakyon, and the blood and hatred of the Mosquito-kinden from her late mentor Uctebri, combining in her now, funnelled into her until she became something quite new: a walker between two worlds, a thing from another age.

And far away, in a direction that had nothing to do with the compass, she felt him answer.

‘Come to me,’ she whispered into the blood-spattered helm. ‘Come now to me, great killer. I, Seda, call to you. I have your blade, your Weaponsmaster’s blade that is more a part of you than it is the smith’s art. I have your heritage embodied in this shell of steel and chitin. I have the blood of royalty for you to drink. Come to me, speak to me. Serve me.’

The armour moved and, despite herself, she took a quick step back. At first it was a subtle shifting of the plates that could have simply been the old metal settling on the stand, but then, and without any definite, identifiable motion, something about it had changed irrevocably, and it was no longer a lifeless object but a man standing, faceless behind the helm.

She was very aware of the blade, the same blade that had shed the blood of so many of her father’s soldiers, that had broken the Shadow Box and killed Uctebri, and condemned her to be what she was now.

‘Look upon me,’ she instructed it. ‘See what I am. I am the heir to the old ways. I am the successor to the Masters of Khanaphes. I am old magic’s envoy in the world.’

Its reply chilled her when it came, in a voice like the rustling of old leaves, the creaking of branches.

One of them. You are the second I have met, to bear that mark.

Something hard crystallized in Seda, a seed of anger and jealousy. ‘Do not fear that. It will not be for long. So, the Beetle girl has sought you also? Well, no matter. She is not so free with the blood of others as I am. She lacks the qualities to command one such as you. Serve me, Mantis-kinden. Tisamon of Felyal, I name you, Weaponsmaster, gladiator, slave and killer. Serve me, be mine.’

And why? came that cold voice once again.

‘Because where else would you find a fit mistress for one such as you, save in me?’ she replied. ‘Because I shall let you fight, and I shall give you blood. Because you shall be the champion of an Empress, her executioner and her blade. But, more than this, you shall serve me for the same reason your living kin here also serve me.’

And what is that?

‘Because I shall bring them all back, those days that you yearn for, the elder days of magic. I am the immortal magician-queen of the Empire, and I shall remake the world in my image, the Apt and the Inapt both. Where your kind’s old masters, the Moth-kinden, have tried for five centuries to turn back the clock with spells and potions, I shall usher in a new age with armies and conquest. The Days of Lore will return, the days of darkness and fear, and I shall rule over them, and you shall be my right hand. Serve me.’

She watched and waited, and saw his blade quiver and flex. Eyes glittered suddenly in the empty night of the helm.

Tisamon nodded.