Heirs of the Blade

Part Two
The Widow
Seven

The Empire had no great tradition of receiving ambassadors, yet these were not the first who had stood before Seda. They were the strangest, and most of her court did not know what to make of them. The great and good of the Wasp-kinden could not decide whether this was some kind of joke, or a calculated insult from an unknown power, on seeing these three cadaverous creatures standing before the throne.

The small proportion of her court who did understand what these visitors were, and what that signified, had gone quite still – like a cricket that spots the twitch of a mantis amongst the leaves. Those were themselves newcomers, a strange detritus of the Inapt that Seda had been quietly cultivating since she had secured her throne against the other would-be emperors who had begun carving off pieces of her rightful domain after her brother’s death. These other ambassadors – the Moth-kinden, the Grasshoppers, scholars and mystics and magi – stared at the three dark-robed creatures as though they were a nightmare come to life.

It was not just what they represented, that sparked such horror. Nor was it because these things were standing in the Empress’s court in broad daylight, whose true place was in the furthest, darkest holes away from the wrath of civilized peoples. It was a fear that these creatures might have a proposal for Seda: a promise of power that would be both greater and darker than those scraps of support that the Moth-kinden had been trying to get the Empress to accept. The price that would be exacted, in return for their gift of tainted power, threatened to undo centuries of bitter history.

The Mosquito-kinden had come to Capitas.

Seda watched them curiously. She had known only one of their kind before, although that one still cast a long shadow even after his death.

They had come to her in her dreams, these three. She was not sure whether they were scapegoat delegates forced by their fellows to undertake this task, or perhaps the boldest and most ambitious of a people sly and retiring by nature; or whether they were renegades cut off from their own kin and seizing on her unique position for a chance of reprieve. It was in dreams, however, that they had made themselves known, whispering promises of power, of understanding, even a twisted kind of comfort, extending a helping hand to draw her from the sea of blood that they knew she must be drowning in.

In her dreams they had been huge and cloaked in the night sky, their gaunt faces commanding. She had felt tiny before them.

Before her now, they were shorn of such grandeur: three haggard, pallid things, wrinkled and sexless. If it were not for those eyes, they would have seemed just some pack of ancient, mongrel beggars, not even worthy of the Slave Corps’ time. But their protuberant and glistening red eyes dominated their every expression with a naked, hungry gleam. One of them, too, had a patch of red across his brow, like a birthmark save that it seemed to shift fluidly as he glanced about the room in jerky motions.

There had been a war, she knew, for her adviser, Gjegevey, had told her that much. In some forgotten corner of the lost centuries, before her race had come into its own, the Moth-kinden, in their strength and wisdom, had broken the power of the Mosquitos, cast them down and saved the world from their thirst for blood and for dominion. Of course, as all the records were kept in their clever, grey-skinned hands, Seda had only their word for the rights and wrongs of it. As the Moths themselves were long since banished to a few mountain fastnesses by their own triumphant slaves, one might think the issue moot. Official Imperial history certainly did: the squabbles of the Inapt kinden in bygone days were not taught in Wasp schools.

She had surprised them, in the end, for as they had pillaged her dreams, whispering and promising, she had shown them only need and weakness, enticing them to creep from their haunts and converge on Capitas. Come to us, their voices had rustled in her mind. Be ours, sworn and sealed. How else will you ever control your new heritage?

When they were close enough to her walls, she had sent soldiers out for them with a polite but forceful invitation to the Imperial court. Here they were: three scraps of old night caught now in the daylight that her artificers funnelled into her throne room, through shafts and high-set windows. Had they come after dusk as they planned, they would have found no less of a glare from the gas lamps. She could see them flinching from it, all the progress and the newness, trying to steady themselves against the moving tide of history.

But she owed their kinden something, and that had earned them a public audience. Also, it did no harm to remind the Moths and the others that she was no creature’s toy, not theirs, nor the Mosquitos’.

‘You have travelled so very long to present yourselves to me,’ she said now, looking down on them from her central seat. On each side of her throne were three lesser seats where her brother had seated his advisers, but these days she seldom shared her glory with anyone. Had her regent been here, then perhaps she would have permitted him a place beside her, but they told her he was dead in some far-off city. Oh, the lies they thought she swallowed, when she could see through them all.

The three Mosquito-kinden had no doubt pictured this meeting differently: they as the masters, and she the meek supplicant. Their obvious discomfort amused her. ‘Speak,’ she encouraged them. ‘Surely such a great journey is of some great import. Have you a boon you wish to ask of me?’

Because they did not know precisely the corner they were backed into, or perhaps because they did, they found their courage from somewhere. One, the oldest and most haggard of the lot, stepped forward.

‘Empress,’ he began, his voice quiet yet carrying, which was an old trick of the Inapt. ‘Your most royal Majesty, you know who we are. The name of the Mosquito-kinden is not foreign to you.’

Seda heard the murmur echo about her court, among the Apt segments of it anyway. There were many there who still clung to the idea that the Mosquitos were nothing but a myth to frighten children with, either lost to time or merely a fiction from the start. There were enough, though, who remembered the Emperor Alvdan’s favourite slave, red-eyed and hungry-faced, a creature akin to these. Uctebri the Sarcad, he had called himself, and few recalled him fondly. Perhaps a few there even knew something of Uctebri’s appetites, of the servants and slaves he left pallid and shaking, and sometimes dead and withered, in his wake. In this new age of a young empress, perhaps it was time for the people of the Empire to reconsider their beliefs, Seda thought.

She had essayed a cautious nod, and the Mosquito-kinden spokesman took this as encouragement. ‘We bring you gifts,’ he claimed. ‘Gifts not of simple treasures, for who could match the treasury of an empire, but gifts of understanding. We see the old faces here at your court, of those who have persecuted and oppressed us throughout the ages. No doubt they claim that they will give you wisdom. We know all too well their narrow-minded creed, Majesty. They will piece out knowledge to you with a parsimonious hand, and pass you only those scraps from their table that they think you fit for. They would presume to judge an empress, believing that their own power is anything but a shadow in these days.’ The visible reaction of those he railed against emboldened him further. ‘Majesty, we are a people in hiding, for they would slay us even now, if they could. Let us serve you, let us teach you our lore, let us be your mentors in all the old ways. You shall find us more open-handed by far than these.’

He waited, but she let herself seem thoroughly absorbed by his words, perhaps a little cowed by them. He shuffled closer, until her guards tensed, and she lifted a hand to hold them back. She let the gaunt, robed figure approach until its hushed next words would be lost to most of her court, intended only for herself.

‘Majesty, we know what has happened to you, and what inheritance has come to rest within you. The Moths may claim it, but you must know they lie. Perhaps there are some dregs of their power in you, but Uctebri was your master, before now, and it is his tradition that has claimed you – our tradition. Who else can teach you of it, save us? And what will become of you, if you do not learn our ways?’ His lips quirked into a smile, showing the translucent needles of his teeth. ‘Or do you think the might of an empire is sufficient to master what lies within you?’

She stood up abruptly, and her court fell silent even as she did.

‘You are in error,’ she said, letting the soldiers and magnates of her court try to piece together precisely what words she was replying to. ‘You recall to us our brother’s slave, whom you claim as kin. You think to presume upon our favour through his name? I will not deny I knew him, and a cunning trickster he was, whom my brother found an endless fascination. Until he died, creature – until my dear, beloved brother was murdered.’

She sensed the tension all around her now, for this had been a topic brought out frequently in recent months. ‘Though a fighting slave held the blade, no single man could suffice to make an end to my brother,’ she said, and she had practised the emotions so well that nobody could have guessed how much she had laughed, the first time she mouthed those words. ‘We are even now uncovering the depths of the conspiracy that contrived his death.’ It was remarkable, how far that conspiracy had spread, starting from a Rekef general and a Mantis-kinden pit slave and then working outwards, like a plague caught by those who had incurred the Empress’s displeasure, that was uniformly fatal. ‘We know, though, for our Rekef has confirmed it, that at the heart of the knot was none other than my brother’s slave, so trusted and so well placed to betray the throne. You come here thus on a traitor’s business.’

Even as she finished speaking, the guards were moving in, but she was more interested in the peculiar sea-change affecting her courtiers. They were not themselves under the lens – none of them would be hauled off to the fighting pits or the crossed pikes today – and so abruptly they started putting on expressions of vengeful outrage, and looking forward to some entertainment.

‘We shall see them meet a fitting end, for the blood their kind has shed,’ she declared. ‘Have them hung by their heels, then have them bled by the wrists until not one drop remains within them.’ And she did not now say, and have that blood brought to me, but there were those of her staff who knew the drill, and went about her business with fat purses and lips sealed, lest they, too, encounter the same fate. The Mosquitos understood, though, for she saw it in their red eyes. ‘Do not assume,’ she told them, ‘that I am not fully educated as to your traditions. ’ Though her court would not understand, it was worth it for their expressions, before they were hauled away.

Invisible to her, there were some hundreds of people making ready within the palace and all across the city. Quartermasters, officers, engineers, chandlers, scouts, cartographers, diplomats, merchants and an army of slaves were smoothing her way so that the Empress’s path should be effortless, greased as it was with the sweat of all their brows.

Her brother Alvdan had never set foot outside the capital. If he had been able to avoid it, he had never left the palace, the scene of his one mean triumph where he had ordered the murder of his siblings at the hands of General Maxin. That the late and unlamented Maxin was now a keystone in the grand and convenient ‘conspiracy’ that Seda had woven around her brother’s death was a source of constant entertainment to her.

The Empire was changing, she knew. Its recent history, even its defeats, had strengthened it and broadened it, and she was not content to sit at home and merely try to fill her father’s shoes, the ones that her brother had tried on for size so many times and found too large for him.

My grandfather Alvric unified the tribes and defeated our nearest neighbours, and he was great in one way. My father Alvdan the First built an empire, and was great in another. My poor brother’s failing was in never finding his own path to greatness, but living off the table scraps of our family history. I have my own road now. And she did, and her forebears would never have guessed at it.

From the shade of her rooms she stepped out on to a balcony, into the bright sunlight, looking down the tiered flanks of the palace, over Capitas the golden city. The sky above it teeming with Wasps and Flies engaged on her errands, the streets coursing with her subjects, warehouses crammed with her treasures, barracks thronging with her armies. Above and to either side of her balcony, several of those soldiers tensed as soon as she showed herself, instantly casting their gaze skywards, in case any of her loyal subjects should harbour conspiratorial designs. Wasp Art furnished its devotees with wings and hands that were deadly at a distance, and for the Empress to stand thus in the open would be a gift to any assassin, which perhaps explained the late Emperor’s reclusive habits.

But I know more than you ever did, Seda reflected, because castigating her dead brother was another source of amusement to her. She was slowly mastering her newfound skills, but the ability to read others and to know of danger, and to turn minds, all these were increasingly within her grasp. Last year an assassin had broken into her very bedchamber. She had talked to him all through the night, and when the guards eventually found him, he was ready to swear undying allegiance to the throne.

She had ordered the intruder skinned alive.

Her shadows moved with her, her constant guards. They were gifts from the Moth-kinden of Tharn, and she knew that her regular soldiers worried about exactly where their loyalties lay. Only Seda could see their hearts, however, and she had twisted them, and twisted them again, by gifts and words, promises and understandings, until the half-dozen Mantis-kinden killers were hers through and through, pledged inviolably to her by their ancient knots of honour. They carried bows and the short-bladed clawed glove that only the Mantids cared for, and any assassins that wished to try their luck would find the Empress’s bodyguards waiting.

She heard the shuffle of feet behind her, and sensed her Mantis-kinden escort tense for a moment. There were few allowed in her chambers unbidden, though, and once they recognized the Woodlouse-kinden, Gjegevey, they relaxed again. The old slave was her favourite adviser, and a supporter of hers since before the Emperor’s death; and if she had learned one lesson from her brother’s failures it was to reward loyal service. More than that, though, Gjegevey understood what she was, what she had become, and what she wanted.

‘I, ahm, understand all is in readiness.’ To the Wasps he was a bizarre spectacle, outlandishly tall and thin, yet so crook-backed that it seemed that he was meant to be taller still. His skin was a pallid greyish-white, with darker bands starting at his forehead and patterning the top of his bald head before disappearing down beneath his robes behind. He claimed to be older than the Empire itself, but his eyes were sharp in their nest of wrinkles. His people dwelt north and east of Wasp lands, she understood, in some steaming swamp-forest of eternally rotting trees, and his kinden were seldom seen. Once, he had been an agent for whatever nebulous leadership existed amongst his scholarly and retiring fellows, but time had eroded the particulars of his original briefing, so now he was hers entirely.

‘Khanaphes,’ she pronounced it carefully, ‘is known to your people, I am sure, in far greater detail than you have described it.’

‘Memory fails me…’ he said vaguely. ‘But perhaps the sight of it will stir some, ah, recollection in me. Without much, hmn, hope, it behoves me to sound my old note of caution once again, Majesty. There are other ways.’

‘We will exhaust them all in time, but why cast away this opportunity? The Empire has come to Khanaphes,’ she told him. ‘My artificers and officers tell me of diverse reasons why we must make the city ours. My soldiers walk its streets even now. You know what I must have, Gjegevey.’

He nodded unhappily, but she knew he would come with her and aid her, if only to retain some hope of influencing the future, of affecting what she might become.

‘Gjegevey, you shepherded me into this world, as much as ever Uctebri did. You opened my eyes to the old magics. You prepared the way that made me this… thing. ’ She saw the pain in his eyes, saw him about to remonstrate with her, but she pressed on. ‘What am I, slave? The ritual that killed my brother stripped me of my birthright, and gave me only rags to hide myself with. Am I to be content in that? The Mosquitos spoke truth in one thing: at the moment I am a beggar at the Moths’ table for what little they deign to share. I have been reborn into a new world, an ancient and terrible world. I therefore see all the things my people are blind to. Am I to be a slave in this new world and only play the empress, as Uctebri designed? Or am I to seize that world with both hands and sting it into submission? You know this, old slave.’

‘But Khanaphes…’ he whispered. ‘They are, hmm, ancient there, or were… perhaps the power is fled from that place, or perhaps. .. perhaps it remains too strong even now…’

‘You can’t have it both ways,’ she told him drily. ‘If they are strong, then I shall be bold and conquer their strength. If they are dead, I will turn over their tombs for what fragments they have left.’ Her face hardened. ‘But I know they are not dead.’

That was news to the old man. ‘Majesty…’

‘I dream, Gjegevey, I dream of lightless halls, of statues that wake and walk. Each night another page to the story. My dreams whisper the name “Khanaphes” to me, over and over. I am called there, as power calls to power. They made themselves the heart of the world in an age lost to my people, an age dim even to the Moths.’ She smiled. ‘And to your own folk, and their rotting libraries?’

‘We… remember,’ he said softly. There was once a time when Moths and Spiders called us brothers, mm? But never did the Masters of Khanaphes. My folk turned away from the world long before the, ah, Moths lost their domain to their slaves, and yet even at our greatest height, so the influence of, hmn, Khanaphes was already in decline. Its greatest golden days were behind it, even then. Old, Your Majesty. Old so that you, or even I, can barely, ah, comprehend. All that is left is the worn stub of what once was.’

‘I will be Empress,’ she told him flatly. ‘Empress of both worlds. The one I shall move with armies and machines, the other…’ She turned from the balcony at last, stepping back into shadow. ‘Do you not wish to walk the secret halls of Khanaphes, Gjegevey?’

His long face always provided a burlesque of melancholy, like a fantastical actor’s mask. ‘I fear I do not, hm, Majesty. But if you walk them, I shall be there beside you.’