‘Majesty . . .?’ Gjegevey queried uncertainly. He did not feel it, she realized. Neither did Tegrec, the Wasp in Moth’s clothing. They were both magicians in their way, but
their power was wan and tepid, rusted from disuse in the one case, and newly minted and shallow in the other. Seda’s speculative gaze moved on, past Tisamon and Ostrec, until she met the
blank eyes of Yraea, the Moth ambassador, and in that featureless gaze she felt some kindred echo. Of course, the Moths had ruled over the Mantids for millennia, and now she, Seda, was treading
where once they had held sole dominion.
And she does not like it
. Seda found herself reading that much into those white eyes.
I wonder what orders she has been given by her Skryre masters? Find some way of taking my
inheritance from me, and then down with the mistress of the Empire, no doubt.
She knew from her own researches that the Days of Lore had not been filled with peace and brotherhood between the
Inapt powers. They had fought, jostled for dominance, destroyed one another.
By the time the Apt began to climb from the mud, their masters had already exhausted themselves.
A failure I do not plan to repeat. I may have to destroy the Moths, if I cannot find a way to rule them.
The same went for the others: she would brook no rivals.
Will I be safe only
when I am the last magician left in the world?
But let me start with the Beetle girl. Perhaps when she is gone the world will dance to my liking. I will brook no rivals, but especially not
her.
And the girl was close, Seda was well aware. Closer and closer, weaving through the dense and haunted trees of this place, and seeking out Argastos for the power that the old shade held. More,
she must feel just the same as Seda felt, as the forest spoke to her, as its convolutions and depths made themselves known.
Just as a map of a mountain range can only hint at the complex creases and folds the real earth is twisted into, so the visible forest was a mere gloss over a tightly knotted magical landscape
centuries old. Here the Mantids had begun, here they had stretched out their mailed and spiny arm to overshadow the Lowlands, at the Moths’ will. From here had sprung their poets and
champions, Weaponsmasters, seers and heroes. Here they had shed blood, their own and that of others, offering by duel and feud so many delicious sacrifices to the wood’s dark and rotten
heart. Here their idols stood, drinking the lives of the fallen. And here they had retreated, once the world had turned. In the last days of their power, here they were to be found, in this place
that had been theirs, and only theirs. This was the unconquered past, the last sanctuary of their histories, and it spoke to her. The forest was like a vast, malevolent mind dispersed and parcelled
out between the trees, the beasts, even the people. She could sense it, this great and ancient thing that did not acknowledge the progressive world without. When the Pioneers and the Nethyen had
fought, she had known of it. When blood was shed, she had rejoiced and grown stronger with it.
She stared into the face of Yraea, sounding out how far that kinship went, and found that she had outstripped the Moth already. Moth-kinden magic was different, more refined, more cautious, ever
playing the long game: a thousand pieces on a board that reached to infinity. The Moths had mastered their Mantis servants, but they had left them their sacred places, their savagery and their
bloody-handed pride. Wasps knew all about that.
We are the true inheritors of the Mantis-kinden, more than any other.
And her spread senses resounded to the encroachment of the Etheryen, already flanking the Pioneers, and she called out ‘To arms!’ Her little band of magicians jumped, startled and
unsure, but Tisamon was moving, as were her Mantis bodyguards in their black and gold mail. And there were Wasps beyond them, soldiers who knew what to do when an order came.
She levelled her hand, feeling the swift flurry through the dark that was the approaching enemy, knowing them as a part of her, tied by the same cords to the vast sounding board of the forest.
When her sting spat, the gold fire searing into the chest of the leading Etheryen warrior, that death was her gift to the forest, and she and her victim were enacting a ritual as old as time.
The Mantis band was small, no more than half a dozen, but they were very swift, and she guessed they had been hunting for her, trying to hack the head from their enemy. Tisamon cut two arrows
from the air that had been loosed at her, and then her soldiers were rushing forwards to interpose themselves, even as her bodyguards engaged. Mantis fought Mantis with all the grace and ferocity
of their training, claw versus claw. Seda simply stood and waited, watching that handful of them eddy and sway, seeing Tisamon strike and strike again, swift and deadly, but meeting a skill that
had the same roots as his own. A handful of Wasps had run in also, and two were dead already, but they had killed off the momentum of the Etheryen charge. For a moment it seemed that nothing was
left except for the killing, but then a silver-haired Mantis man broke free of the melee, dancing aside from Tisamon’s lunge with a young-man’s nimble step, and he was driving at Seda
the next moment.
And the forest did not care, of course. Blood was blood, and if she fell to this man’s steel claw, that would also be fitting.
She exerted herself, however, focusing her attention on him in the brief second before he reached her.
Fear me, worship me, adore me.
Time slowed about her, and she wrestled with the
arrowhead of his mind even as her palm spread, sting heating in her fingers.
Or am I too slow?
As if in a dream, she saw him falter but not stop. The claw was drawn back, ready to drive itself down into her, and still she had no belief in it.
I am Seda,
Empress of the Wasps. I cannot die.
Then Ostrec was there, ducking in low under the Mantis’s guard with shocking speed: no sting, not even a sword, but ramming a dagger home to the hilt, sending the Mantis staggering,
keeping him just out of blade range of the Empress. The man refused to fall, but by then it was too late because Tisamon had caught him up, that one second making all the difference, and Seda let
her sting cool again as her armoured ghost opened the silver-haired Mantis’s throat with a hooking strike.
It was over by then. She had lost three soldiers and two of her six bodyguards, a steep price to pay. The small band of Etheryen had gambled all they had on killing her, on excising her from
their world.
I am here to stay, and this is my world now
. She hurled the thought out into the forest, and felt its answering response: approving, darkly amused and greedy for blood. She knew then
that it would do its best to kill her, by the blades of its people, by the hooked arms of its monstrous beasts, by its sheer darkness – but it would do so with love. It would gather her to
it, if she let it, and perhaps in a hundred years someone would come questing here to find
her
ghost.
But she was Seda the Empress, and she would master it, and make it hers, to enjoy or destroy as she saw fit. Here she had come at last into her true kingdom.
And, somewhere out there, Argastos.
There were few non-Ants in Sarnesh service, the lack of a mind-link proving an insurmountable failing for most. Ants could not fly, though, and whilst that link allowed them
the coordination to move without error through the semi-dark of the Mantis forest, their vision could not pierce it the way those of the natives could. In their logical way, therefore, even the
Ant-kinden kept a few outsiders on the payroll.
It must be hard
, Che decided, as she stepped carefully through the tangled undergrowth.
There’s nowhere in which to be an outsider quite like an Ant city-state.
The chief scout’s name was Zerro, and he must have lived amongst the Ants a long time, for he even had their look: that closed-mouthed, hard-eyed Ant expression that told of an untouchable
internal world. No such world, of course, for a Fly-kinden like Zerro, but he almost acted as if there was, reading the thoughts of his comrades from their stance, from the minute traces of
expression even Ants were prone to. As a scout, he led a weird backwards existence, creeping ahead of the line, but putting as much effort into remaining in sight of the Sarnesh as he did in
keeping hidden from the enemy. If something happened to him, it was imperative that the Ants had warning, and being seen was the only way he could communicate that to them.
They had outstripped the main body of the Sarnesh – who were making a steady and careful advance behind them, meeting up with the Etheryen and skirting the locals’ concealed
tree-villages, trying to create an expanding frontier to force the Nethyen back. The Ant commander, Sentius, had been at absolute pains to work with the Mantis-kinden, to humour them and to respect
their wishes. No Beetle diplomat could have done a better job, Che thought, and it was all just another facet of Ant-kinden efficiency, the easiest way for them to achieve their goal.
Zerro and his Sarnesh scouts were meanwhile already past all of that and into contested territory, though Che had witnessed no fighting yet. The Fly had not been at all happy about bringing her
and her followers along with him, seeing them as a noisy, clumsy liability. She thought that his opinion might have changed by now. With the exception of Helma Bartrer, who was still stumbling
along at the back even though she had changed her Collegiate robes for a tunic and cloak of muted brown, the rest of them moved through the forest with surprising ease. Oh, no surprise that Tynisa
was at home here, or even the Moth, Terastos; and Che supposed that Thalric had done enough sneaking about in his time, and Maure too. Even big Amnon had always had a smooth grace about him,
whether hunting the Jamail delta of his homeland, or here so many miles away from it.
I suppose it is just me that actually surprises me
; Beetle stealth was the butt of a hundred Fly
jokes.
How do you know a Beetle’s breaking into your house? He knocks first.
Here, though . . .
The forest was a dark, cruel place, stained with old blood, but it knew her. ‘Welcomed’ would be a step too far, but the anointing she had received in Khanaphes was good currency
here. The forest might kill her, in the end, but it would do so with respect, and she moved through the chest-high ferns and briars with a dancer’s step, and her eyes knew no darkness.
The Sarnesh around them stopped, not a sudden jolt but a collective fading into stillness at some signal sent from ahead. Che closed her eyes and let herself take in the rhythms of the trees
about her, the forest’s slow old heartbeat. There were Nethyen hunting parties out there, she knew. She could not have told Zerro quite where they were, but she felt them impinge on her mind
like tiny thorns. None so close as to be a threat, although there was already blood on the air from skirmishes and brief flashes of violence between the trees.
It had been a long time since there had been so much killing within this wood, she discerned, and she could feel the whole place
waking up
by increments, something primitive and
sluggish gathering its wits.
For a moment her mind touched something else, and in a start of panic she thought it must be the Empress, but the texture of the mind that she sensed was not Seda the Wasp’s. It lacked her
fierce fire, but there was a great wellspring of power there nonetheless. Then it was gone in an instant, unlocatable, just a chance brushing of consciousness, but Che formed the name
Argastos
in her mind.
And if I know your name, old Moth, does that give me power over you? Or have you transcended that?
She had asked Maure what might be left of this ancient Moth hero-sorcerer by now. The halfbreed necromancer had just shaken her head. ‘This whole place is just built of ghosts,’ had
been her response. ‘I’d say “all of him” but I’ve a feeling that there might be more of him, now, than there ever was when he was alive. Just because we get to him
first doesn’t mean that we’ll enjoy it a moment later. Maybe better to let the Wasp woman have that honour?’
But Che knew Seda’s strength and indomitable will.
I cannot let her have Argastos – or whatever he left behind him. If that means I must take the risk myself, then so be it.
And, in the wake of that, she reflected:
I am thinking like a magician now. Where did all this ambition come from?
They were moving again, heading off at an angle, very slowly, and she tried to work out what was going on. At first she used her mere eyes, as any slave of Aptitude might, and there was nothing.
Then the Ants had frozen again, and she saw them readying their weapons, crossbows mostly because those were quieter than snapbows.
What is it? Tell me . . .
Tynisa was moving forwards ahead of her, and already identifying the problem, but Che caught up effortlessly.
Now I see.
A strange, reckless feeling had overcome her, a need to discover
what she could do in this new place.
There is magic concentrated here, layer on layer of old ritual and belief encrusted about the roots of every tree, far more than ever there was in the
Commonweal.
Zerro was right ahead, but he was not looking back at her. Instead, he had one hand out to the Ants, fingers moving in a slow, deliberate code. His eyes were fixed on the beast.
It stood one and a half times the height of a tall man. The tree cover here was dense, and yet a lush, strangely pallid undergrowth extended all about them, as though living on something other
than sun and air. The mantis itself had an ivory sheen to it, and was near invisible in its perfect poise. Tynisa was already limping forwards, and Che recalled she had faced down just such a
creature in the Commonweal, but she put a hand on her foster-sister’s arm, stilling her.
‘Che, don’t play around,’ Tynisa murmured from the corner of her mouth, eyes fixed firmly on the insect. Its killing arms were still drawn in tight, and its vast, pale eyes saw
everything.