Heirs of the Blade (Shadows of the Apt 7) Page 9

  The scene within the walls was reminiscent of the aftermath of a siege. In the centre of the compound, a band of ferocious-looking warriors had built up a grand fire and were now singing raucously and handing round a skin of some potent liquor. They were long-haired and bearded, and wore furs and brightly dyed homespun, and Tynisa had no idea what kinden they might be, save a very noisy one indeed. Around them, a fair number of Dragonfly peasants hurried about, carrying bundles and buckets, lifting, cleaning, clearing and obviously doing their best to ignore their barbarous guests.

  There were a dozen buildings within Lowre’s little domain, and Tynisa was surprised to see that many of them were of stone, and not the ancient stone of the Commonwealer castles, but something more like the civilized architecture she was used to. One such was plainly a forge, from the ring of hammers issuing from it, but there were a couple of larger buildings of unclear purpose, although back home she would have labelled one as a workshop.

  The prince’s own home must be the largest structure there, its lower storey stone-built and the upper two constructed sturdily of wood. The general shape was borrowed from the local castles – as Felipe’s had been – but unlike that fragile construction, Lowre had obviously retired here to somewhere that could be defended. Tynisa read in this that he was, in some way, still fighting the war.

  The messenger, who had never volunteered his name, had a boy come and lead her horse away, then informed her that he would go find his master and announce her arrival. He left Tynisa standing somewhat bemusedly in the centre of the compound, with all the business of a noble’s estate bustling away on all sides. One of the uncouth-looking warriors called out some unintelligible suggestion to her, and she glared at the lot of them, to their great amusement. Then there came a Roach-kinden man leading a string of horses, whom she was forced to stand aside for, which in turn put her in the path of a peasant woman, two buckets yoked over her shoulders, on her way to fill the water-troughs. One of the savages had meanwhile started up some ferocious howling noise which she realized belatedly was intended as a song, and from the far side of the buildings she heard a fierce chirring, as a pack of house crickets began stridulating in protest.

  And then the messenger appeared at her elbow once again. ‘My master will see you now.’

  Lowre Cean was neither enthroned like a prince nor practising at arms like a warrior noble. Instead she found him in a strange room lined with little wooden hutches, each fronted with latticed wire, so that she assumed this man kept crickets or jewel beetles, both of them common pets back home. He was a tall old figure, his hair white and thinning, and his long face was creased by the echoes of a hundred strong emotions. He wore a long grey smock, looking nothing like a prince or a war hero. There was a sharp, sour smell about the whole room that was utterly unfamiliar.

  ‘Maker Tynise, my Prince,’ the messenger announced, then stepped back and away to leave the two of them alone.

  Tynisa could only wonder at the way these Commonwealers seemed to have no fear of strangers bearing ill intent. Were there no assassins in Dragonfly-kinden history?

  She was indeed no threat, or so she hoped. That cold rage had not touched her again since Siriell’s Town. Perhaps this equally cold winter had put it to sleep.

  ‘My lord.’ She tried something like their type of formal bowing, got it wrong, but Lowre Cean was not watching. Instead, he was cupping something in his hands with infinite concentration. She took a step forward to get a look at the things in the cages, and recoiled back to the doorway with a yelp. She had never seen anything like them.

  They were tiny enough to fit into the palm of his hand, and they were manic, leaping and darting inside their little boxes as though furious at their captivity. They had two stick-thin legs ending in little clawed hands, and ragged paddles for arms – no, for wings, she realized, although they hardly seemed the right shape for taking to the air. Their little round heads had madly staring little round eyes and a beak like a tiny blunt dagger-blade, and their skin was furred with something a little like the scales of a moth’s wing. They had been quiet, but her approach had set them off into a twittering, piercing cacophony of sound, a random and tuneless assault on the ear.

  The lean old Dragonfly in their midst turned and gave her a wry smile. He was actually holding one of the vile creatures in his hands, a thought that made Tynisa’s skin crawl. ‘Forgive me,’ she heard him say, over the racket. ‘I had forgotten how my little pets are an acquired taste. My family has always bred these little singers, and since the war I have begun to devote more of my time to our old fancy here.’ With infinite care he replaced his charge in one of the boxes and closed the grill, whereupon the little creature began yammering and twitching like all the others.

  ‘You are Prince-Major Lowre Cean?’ Tynisa began uncertainly. She had seen Felipe Shah eventually behaving like a prince, and Salma’s mother most certainly like a particularly arch princess. This man was not conforming to her expectations.

  ‘That is the curse I bear,’ he confirmed, washing his hands before removing his smock. Beneath it he wore a plain, pale robe, something even a servant would look drab in. ‘And you are the Lowlander? Fascinating.’

  ‘Please, master, why did you send for me?’ she asked. ‘How did you even know about me?’

  ‘Why magic, of course. Your coming was foretold centuries ago.’

  She goggled at him in astonishment, and it was only after he had stepped out of the menagerie that she saw how a mischievous twinkle had entered his tired eyes.

  ‘Or perhaps it was a Fly-kinden messenger from Suon Ren bearing word from my old friend Felipe Shah,’ he added. ‘Shah believed that you might find yourself a little stranded here in Leose, so asked that I extend to you all hospitality due to an honoured ambassador from the Lowlands.’ For a man of his age he stood very straight, and despite his dress and circumstances she had a brief glimpse of the man he had been during the war. ‘If you wish it, that is.’

  Tynisa thought again of Salme Alain, who would no doubt return home sooner or later. She thought of Gaved and Sef, whose resources were meagre and who would doubtless prefer to retain their privacy over the winter.

  More than that, though, she thought of Felipe Shah, and of this old man now before her, two Dragonfly nobles whose war-wounds were borne on the inside, but who could still find charity for a stray Lowlander out of nowhere, penetrating all her angst and guilt and fretting about her purpose, she felt a moment’s sunlight touch her.

  ‘I wish it,’ she told Cean with profound gratitude.

  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.