‘What makes you think,’ Gizmer grated, ‘that you want to be the best right now?’
Kiin’s lips were moving silently, and Pingge realized that she was counting. After that, the conclusion was inevitable.
Forty of them, she saw, if she discounted Varsec and a couple of engineers plainly not part of Aarmon’s people. Forty of us.
Varsec gave a nod and stepped back, giving the floor over to Aarmon. He was a pale, broad-shouldered Wasp with a shaved head and oddly flat eyes, as though he was not using them in the normal way but looking out of them as one would through a window.
‘Reticule-men, attention!’ one of Varsec’s aides snapped, and the Fly-kinden automatically shuffled and elbowed their way into rough ranks, a mockery of the perfect Wasp grid facing them. This was part of their daily routine, and they ordered themselves without needing to think about it.
Aarmon stepped forward, casting those lifeless eyes over them, looking from face to face — and looking down, of course: in size they were like children to him and to all of his fellows. He seemed to be assessing them by some incalculable criterion. All the while, his comrades stood absolutely motionless, not a fidget, not a word, not even an expression exchanged. Pingge had seen Wasps on parade before, and she knew all the little ways soldiers had of communicating one to another under the eyes of the drill sergeant. There was none of it here. It was a display to make a disciplinarian weep, presented here in a windowless hall for an audience of one major and a rabble of Fly-kinden.
Aarmon pointed and then, when no reaction was forthcoming, he said, ‘You,’ like an afterthought.
He was indicating Kiin, of course.
Pingge gasped, ‘No!’, but there was nothing for it. If this was some example to be made, crossed pikes or a stingshot to the head or some other warning to keep silent, there was nothing she could do. Captain Aarmon was waiting, his bleak stare fixed on his victim as though it could draw her to him on its own.
Kiin took a deep breath and, none too steady, stepped forward.
No windows in the room, Pingge thought miserably. Is that so nobody can see us here? So we can’t escape? She watched her friend weave her way through the other Flies until she was standing to attention before Aarmon, staring at his belt buckle, a delicate, fair-haired woman of three foot six before a big Wasp man topping six feet.
‘With me,’ he told her, and turned instantly, awaiting neither salute nor acknowledgement, leaving her to stumble mutely in his wake as he stalked from the room. Pingge saw the other Wasps stepping forwards, all at once now, selecting others from the Fly group. She cast a panicked stare back, trying to see what happened to Kiin, and caught a last glimpse of her friend as Kiin’s reluctant march carried her out through the door, tripping after Aarmon’s longer strides.
‘What is she?’ Esmail demanded. ‘What has happened to her?’
His informant shrank away from him, babbling something about not knowing what he meant, but he slammed the man back against the cellar wall, using Ostrec’s borrowed strength and violence. His life was at stake in a way that his briefing had never suggested. Someone was playing him for a fool.
The Empress was something more than a Wasp-kinden woman, more than the mere temporal ruler of a military state.
He had gone along after Colonel Harvang, dogging the obese man’s greasy steps until he stood amidst the great and the good of the Empire: the Rekef’s sole surviving general, another colonel, their chief artificer and some Beetle-kinden who was one of their leading merchants. Ostrec had been well placed, groomed to be Harvang’s aide, to run errands and messages between the great powers of the Empire, circumstances that bore all the fingerprints of Moth foretelling and calculation, but at a level far in excess of anything Esmail had worked with before.
So why had they not told him about the Empress? Because they did not know? Because they wanted his own, unbiased assessment?
He was not sure that he could possibly give an unbiased account of that. As she had drawn close, he had felt a pressure inside his skull, inexplicable here in the mechanistic Empire, reminiscent of times past when great Moth-kinden Skryres had turned their arts upon him. Then she had entered the room.
He was a past master at his trade, of keeping the inner man and the outer face separate, showing nothing of who and what he was and living the life of the other. When she strode in, though, he had not been able to keep still. The sheer sight and sense of her had shocked him like a spear through the chest.
She had glanced at him then, and he had fought, physically fought, to keep his wards and masks intact, because some primal part of him had been clamouring for him to fall to his knees and confess all.
Even now he could not say whether he had escaped undetected. He did not know what senses she had inherited, or what subtlety in using them. The Rekef might come for him any moment, turning on one seemingly of their own without the least stab of conscience. Even now she might have him dragged before her.
Power had radiated from her in waves, enough to blast aside his false face and leave him naked and terrified before her splendour. She had been as difficult to look at as the sun, for those first few moments, until his inner eyes had adjusted. Above her brow there had seemed a burning brand, a diadem of invisible but inescapable authority.
What his briefing had given him was the name of a well-placed servant who was also an Arcanum agent — an elderly Grasshopper who had served in Capitas for over a decade, feeding information back to the Moths in shreds and pieces for all that time. Any other spy would have been uncovered by now, but the old man was subtle, and the Moths had never acted on any of it, only hoarded it against the future, as they always did.
After dark, Esmail had left his room in the extensive complex that Harvang and his Rekef adherents called their own, stalking across the rooftops with a stealth that Ostrec the Wasp had never possessed, then hunting down his informant, a shadow with a Wasp’s shape, until he found the single cramped room that the Grasshopper shared with a half-dozen others.
The man’s name was Shoel Jhin, and he was a magician of very minor sorts, whose powers would no doubt have eroded during his long slavery here. Esmail himself was no great conjuror — the elements of his trade relied on control and elegance of manipulation rather than raw power — but he had a few magus’s tricks, and it was a simple matter to put his voice in Jhin’s mind and hiss out the man’s name until he awoke, starting and staring: then to call him out of the room, out of the servants’ block, until he met the old man face to face within the cold walls of a wine cellar.
Now he stared down at that lined face, the sallow skin bagged and creased with care and age. ‘You’re a poor spy or a lax one. Don’t you realize there was something missing from your reports?’
‘I tell what I tell. What they tell you is another matter,’ Jhin wheezed.
Ostrec wanted to beat him for his insubordination. Esmail could feel rage emanating from the image of the man he kept in his head, the source of his mimicry. ‘I came here to spy on a Wasp, one of the Apt,’ he said, in more measured tones. ‘An Empress, yes, and we all know the power that attaches to such symbols, but it’s not a power that she should be able to tap. I’ve never…’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘I have never felt such a presence.’
Shoel Jhin was watching him, beady eyes nesting in wrinkles examining the spy’s false face. ‘Help you, they said. Educate you, no. They tell you what they tell you. Not my place, not my place at all.’
Esmail still held the man by his collar but now he let go, stepping back, suppressing Ostrec’s borrowed anger. It occurred to him that the old man did not know who he was, not really — oh, a spy, yes, and one of that very select and mercurial order, but no more than that. Just some Moth, probably, was Jhin’s guess.
Esmail stepped back from him. ‘Tell me,’ he urged softly.
Jhin actually cackled a little. ‘Not my place,’ he repeated, and made to walk past him.
He stopped, for Esmail had fixed him with a look, Ostrec’s pale eyes holding an expression neither Wasp nor Moth ever had. Esmail let the mask slip slightly, letting out some sense of what hid behind: the villain of ages, the murderer-kinden, the lost race.
The old Grasshopper stayed very still, on the brink of a revelation he plainly had no wish for. ‘You… you…’ he whispered. The assassins, the killers of the old times, but no, but surely no — they’re gone, all of them, and the Moths were ever their enemies… Esmail could all but read the thoughts coursing through the old man’s head.
‘They send who they send,’ he said, pointedly.
Shoel Jhin bared his yellowed teeth. ‘You think it will help, even that?’ he started to say, but Esmail hissed out, ‘Just tell me!’ forcing the man back with his stare until Jhin’s shoulderblades were against the cold wall again.
