She had sent one of her Red Watch to bring the last of the slaves to her chambers. The blood would help her think.
General Roder did as he was bidden, and even if thoughts of attacking this conspiracy of the Inapt crossed his mind twenty times before nightfall, he could never act on them.
All too often he saw that armoured form when he glanced round, quite out of its expected place, until eventually he felt he was seeing it even when it was not there.
Then the old slave came for him, tracking him down amongst all the bustle of the camp, where Roder had tried to lose himself.
‘It is time, General,’ Gjegevey told him. ‘You will understand, now.’
Roder wondered if he would survive that understanding but, by then, dying with that knowledge seemed almost preferable to living without it.
‘Lead on, then.’ He glowered into that kindly old face, whose wrinkles no doubt hid sins that the Wasps did not even have names for.
Gjegevey began shuffling away, poling himself along with a staff, his old man’s pace unbearably slow to a man used to the fierce energy of a soldier’s stride.
‘You are, hm, suspicious, of course,’ Gjegevey’s voice drifted back to him. ‘There have been many changes in the Empire of late, I know. New machines, new institutions, a
shift in the balance of power, the Rekef perhaps not what it once was, the Engineers more . . .’
To hear that sort of sane and sensible talk, rather than a mystic’s babble, was something of a surprise, but Roder reminded himself that this old man had been a slave to the late Emperor,
and to the Emperor before that, a tool long kept in Imperial service. No doubt he had talk suitable for all markets.
‘There were those in Capitas who doubted whose hand truly, hm, guided the Empire,’ the slave continued, not looking back at Roder.
Were . . . ?
And yet there had been odd news from the capital of late. A spate of disappearances, certainly – and with the Rekef about that was not surprising, save that half the
names had been men high up in the Rekef itself.
They were nearing the camp’s northern edge by now, and Roder keenly felt how exposed they were to anything that might have come creeping out of the forest that massed on the dark
horizon.
‘Believe me in this, General,’ Gjegevey told him, slowing, ‘it is all to do with
her
. All of it is her. She moves us all.’ Almost a whisper, confidant to
confidant.
There were figures up ahead, just a handful of them isolated beyond the bounds of the Eighth’s camp. In the poor light he identified them: Seda, of course, and her bodyguards, including
that armoured form that made his skin crawl. A couple of the Red Watch stood at the group’s edge, and he saw the Moth woman was there too, and the traitor Wasp.
Is she mad?
was all that Roder could think. That the Empress of all the Wasps, the most powerful, the most important woman in the world, was standing out here, prey for the first Mantis
war band to come out of Nethyon, was inconceivable. Yet here she was, and he could not caution her or warn her, still less order her back to safety, as was surely his duty. A glance from her and
his words of reproach were gone.
‘General, thank you for joining us,’ she acknowledged, a slight smile showing that she was well aware how little choice he had in the matter. ‘You know Gjegevey, of course, and
perhaps you know Tegrec, the Tharen ambassador?’ This was the robed Wasp, once Imperial governor of Tharn and now employed as the Moth’s turncoat ambassador to his own people.
‘This is Yraea, also of Tharn.’ Seda indicated the Moth woman. ‘Gjegevey, perhaps some light?’
The old slave found an oil lamp on his person, and surprised Roder by flicking away at it with a steel lighter until the wick caught, rather than rubbing sticks together or however the Inapt
might do it. The lamp itself, even just placed on the ground, was vastly reassuring. The darkness was still full of unseen assassins, but at least their imagined presence had been driven further
away.
But then they arrived, stepping from that dark previously only peopled by Roder’s fears. He started away with a curse, hand coming up ready to sting, but a single gesture by Seda stopped
him.
He knew them, these newcomers. His soldiers had felt their depredations ever since they came close to the cursed forest. The Nethyen Mantids had not been slow in taking advantage of every
weakness in the Eighth’s security, so that Roder had been forced to make a new decision each day, weighing any progress against the lives he expected to lose. Their sporadic, savage raids on
his forces had slowed him to a crawl, while all the scouts and Pioneers he could muster had netted but a fraction of the enemy. And here they were.
The enemy.
He saw a half-dozen of them: Mantis men and women, tall and arrogant, with angular features and disdainful looks. They had come fully armed, with bows and spears, rapiers and claws, and they
wore a mishmash of yesterday’s armour: scaled cuirasses, plates of chitin, moth-fur and the odd piece of fantastically wrought metal that was a match for anything the Empress’s mailed
bodyguard wore.
Yraea the Moth went over to them straight away, and it was plain that she carried some weight with them. They at least paused to speak to her, though their arch expressions did not quite concede
that she had power over them. Roder had heard how the Mantids used to be the Moths’ slaves, back when the world was young, but he guessed that time had rubbed the shine off
that
arrangement, judging from the way these warriors shuffled and glowered and stared at the Empress’s party.
Then the Moth woman was stepping aside – almost shouldered aside – and the Mantids were storming forwards. Roder tensed, and was not remotely reassured to find that the rest were
bracing too – the Empress’s women bodyguards and Tegrec, even Gjegevey. Only the mailed form remained still, and Roder felt that it harboured a constant tension anyway, always just on
the verge of violence.
From Seda’s manner, by contrast, she might be receiving a Beetle trade delegation in her throne room back at Capitas.
She opened her arms to the Mantids, displaying herself to them – and if her hands were spread to sting, well, amongst other kinden that was a gesture of friendship, was it not? If one of
them jumped forwards with spear or rapier, then the Empire would be headless once again, and who knew what might follow?
Roder was almost physically holding himself back, ready at the first wrong move to leap forwards and fight for her, and well aware that he would be too slow, even so.
And they knelt. All six of them went down on one knee, heads bowed, weapons on the ground, the killing tension vanishing without any explanation. The Mantids abased themselves before the Empress
of the Wasps, when they had barely spared a kind look for the Moth Yraea.
Roder stole a glance at the other faces gathered there. Surely they had all been expecting this? But he saw writ plain on that rabble of mystics’ faces that they had not. They had expected
terms, treaties, negotiations that they themselves could have meddled with – not this abject surrender.
‘Rise,’ the Empress said to them, just as she had to Roder earlier. ‘Rise and speak.’
The foremost of the Mantids, a cord-lean woman, ageless and scarred, tried twice before she could utter a word. Her eyes were young, struck with a sort of adulation that Roder had never seen
before, ‘You will bring it back,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘I will bring it all back, all that you once had,’ Seda told her gently. ‘Go and tell your people that their time is coming again. That
I
will do this thing, and none
other, if they bind themselves to me.’
‘We shall,’ the Mantis woman whispered. ‘Empress, we shall.’
And they were padding off, the six of them stepping swiftly into the darkness, eager to spread the word, and Seda turned her smiling face on Roder and trapped him in the radiance of her
regard.
‘You see, General? Even so simply does the Empire conquer. You understand all, now.’
‘I understand nothing,’ Roder frankly admitted, before he could stop himself. ‘I understand enough,’ he corrected himself.
‘The Nethyen are with us, as is Tharn. The Inapt that formerly declared for Sarn and Collegium are divided. Now your work begins. The hold of Etheryon has always been close to Sarn, and
likely they will hold to the Ants, as will the Moth-kinden at Dorax. There will be fighting amidst the trees even tonight. You must arrange for your very best, your scouts and Pioneers and
wildsmen, to enter the forest and fight alongside our new allies. You can be sure the Sarnesh will be doing the same. Whoever controls this forest controls our road to Sarn.’
Roder considered the list that he had drawn up, at Gjegevey’s urging. ‘It shall be accomplished, Empress.’
‘Of course it shall.’ She was turning back to head for the camp, but more words forced themselves from Roder’s lips.
‘Empress . . . what you promised them . . .?’
Her smile was still as sweet. ‘They feel betrayed, General. The Apt city-states of the Lowlands and their modern ways have made such inroads into the Mantis way of life, as the corruption
of the Etheryen hold shows. Now the Nethyen will fight just for the right to be left to their own devices. Just as we do in the Empire, they value their traditions.’
Roder glanced at Seda’s armoured shadow, to find that faceless helm looking right back at him. He had an unhappy feeling that he was somehow looking right into the heart of those old
Mantis traditions, but he would never be able to put it into words.
He was about to hurry back to camp and surround himself with men whose company he understood, but Seda herself had paused, and for the first time that night Roder sensed that she was in less
than complete control of the world.
The Empress was looking towards the hostile west, where the skies were still faintly grey with sunset. ‘Gjegevey,’ she murmured.
‘Here, your, hm, Majesty.’ The old slave was at her elbow immediately.
‘Is it . . . ?’ A terrible, hard cast fell over the Empress’s face. ‘It’s
her
.’
Roder had no idea who ‘
her
’ might be, but whoever it was had better prepare herself for the end, for utter hatred was writ large in the Empress’s expression.
‘She’s here
, here
!’ Seda turned wild eyes on Gjegevey. ‘She is here for your Argastos, just as I am. She seeks to keep it from me.’
The slave spread long-fingered hands in demurral, but Seda would not be forestalled. ‘Then I cannot wait, nor will I be denied. General, have your soldiers ready to enter the forest
tomorrow morning, in force. And have ready your very best Pioneers, your most skilled trackers and hunters and woodsmen. I will have work for them all.’
‘My Empress, no!’ Gjegevey started, showing more courage in the face of her anger than Roder himself could have mustered.
‘And wait for the leaden clash of armies while she steals what is mine?’ Seda demanded. ‘Only one of us can live, Gjegevey, the stronger of us. If she takes what is here, then
it will be
her
. Is that what you
want
?’
‘Empress, no, but—’
‘Then prepare yourself, old man, for you’re coming too.’
‘Look at this, though.’
Sartaea te Mosca glanced politely at the scroll Gerethwy had unrolled for her. ‘Two matters, dear one,’ she replied. ‘Firstly, what in the world do you think that I would make
of that, save for tinder? Secondly this would be considerably easier for me if you kept still. Consider that I am slightly smaller than your arm: every slightest twitch throws me about as though
I’m in a hurricane.’
She exaggerated slightly, but he was an enormously tall, long-limbed man, a Woodlouse-kinden, perpetually hunched like an old man, but a young and sprightly student where the few others of his
kinden that anyone had ever seen seemed to have been ancient forever, old as the stones of Collegium. He had come from the east with an esoteric but impressive understanding of machines that had
won him a place at the Great College, and he had stayed on for the war.
Te Mosca herself was a Fly-kinden, and someone who had also turned up begging at the College gates, though in her case she had come from the Moth-kinden at Dorax, and had been looking for work.
The old chair for Inapt studies – meaning those parts of the world that the Apt neither understood nor cared about – had been gathering dust, but even then they had not made her a full
master, just had her marking out her time as though a replacement was expected at any moment. There had been votes in Assembly, she knew, to abolish the position entirely, but respect for tradition
had thus far allowed her field of study to cling on by its fingernails.
She was small even for a Fly, delicate of frame and with a faint ashen tint to her skin, for her kinden often looked a little like those they grew up amongst. She taught the histories of the
Inapt as they themselves would tell it, and she taught a little of the principles of magic, but her few students were mostly Apt and, however diligently they took notes, they could never grasp even
the most basic tenets. It was a curiously futile existence, but she enlivened it by offering her skills as a doctor. Inapt kinden often fared far better under the care of an Inapt healer and, when
it came to it, she could stitch a wound almost as well as any Collegiate surgeon.
She took Gerethwy’s long hand in both of hers and inspected the stumps where an exploding weapon had torn off two fingers. ‘Healing nicely,’ she said, ‘but it would heal
far quicker if you’d not use the hand. It must hurt you, surely?’
He shrugged, something his bony hunchbacked frame was made for. ‘But there’s too much work. I’m due to drill with the Companies, and I need every moment I can get at the
workshops. Nobody else will.’ He thrust the paper at her again, then dragged it back, recognizing the pointlessness of it. Gerethwy himself was a man who seemed to understand everything. He
sat through her lectures as attentively as any Inapt scholar, seeming to take it all in, but then went off to the workshops to work on his devices. Her own masters had always muttered that the
Woodlouse-kinden were a law unto themselves.