say.
The docks were a chaos of running and shouting — militia and Solarnese citizens dashing back and forth without plan. The waters of the Exalsee beyond held a host of sails, tall and pale in the moonlight. It was not the armada that had recently come against Collegium, but Laszlo knew a Spider-kinden fleet when he saw one.
Breighl was right; it’s not the Wasps…
Two of the ships were already moored, with Spider soldiers spilling unopposed onto the quays with bows and spears. Laszlo had no time for any of it. His feet took up again towards the surgeon’s door, even though the old Bee-kinden might already have fled. He had no other option just now. Lissart laughed then, a wrenched and strangled sound. She clutched him tight with one arm, but the other pointed up and past his shoulder. Even as she did, he registered the sound: distant engines coming closer, and that would awake Solarno far quicker than any panic at the docks.
He got to the surgeon’s door and kicked at it furiously, until the squat, dark old mariner threw it open, an axe in one hand to repel boarders, To his credit, despite the fleet, despite what else was surely coming, when he saw Lissart he took her from Laszlo with practised care and carried her inside.
Only then did Laszlo turn. The Wasp orthopters were hard to see as they scattered across the sky over Solarno, but they were escorting a handful of airships which caught the moonlight well enough. There were some Solarnese fliers up there too, the free pilots, but with the Firebugs burning there would be no unified civic response. The Solarnese government was no doubt already breaking into arguing factions even as their city was invaded from north and south. Solarno was about to become a battleground.
Fourteen
General Brugan was afraid.
The world feared the Empire, and the Empire feared the Rekef, which in turn feared its lord and master, Brugan himself. His subordinates would not have believed that he himself might twitch and turn through sleepless nights, or wake suddenly from terrible, all-too-plausible dreams. General Brugan feared, too, and what he was afraid of was the Empress.
And yet he was drawn to her — fear becoming somehow an attracting quality. She was beautiful, and she had a fire no other woman possessed, and there were moments, gazing on her in daylight, when he loved her so much that he would give himself up to that fire and burn on it, agony and ecstasy together.
He had made her, he knew. He had been the first man of any influence to cast his lot behind her treasonous campaign. When she had assumed the throne, it had been by his hand, and he had looked to be rewarded.
The Empire had never been ruled by a woman before — she had needed a man beside her to reassure the traditionalists. In the end she had taken a regent, a former Rekef man, and former traitor, Thalric by name. The wretch had taken the place that Brugan had prepared for himself, but at the time Brugan had told himself that there was nevertheless time for all things to come to pass.
Thalric had gone from puppet — token male to sit beside the throne — to a companion of the Imperial bedchamber, and only through his own reaction to that knowledge had Brugan realized that his feelings towards Empress Seda were more than simply ambitious. He discovered that his intention to control the Empress had become one of possessing her. Then Thalric had deserted again during the Rekef operation in Khanaphes, which was a disappointment to Brugan only because of the effort he himself had invested in seeing Thalric left dead and buried under the ruin of an entire civilization. Still, with the upstart bastard out of the way, he had thought perhaps the Empress would take a more suitable partner.
By then, Seda’s charm and acumen had worked sufficient wonders to ensure that she no longer needed a token regent, but her hungers were no less fierce, and Brugan could still recall the cold satisfaction he had felt when she had invited him into her bed.
Could still recall… or perhaps say: Was unable to forget.
He lived two separate lives now. He was an Apt man, rational and sensible, who during the day could look at Seda and know that all he was seeing was her extraordinary charisma, her force of personality that twisted people around to her way of thinking. What else could it be? She was simply a natural leader, gifted beyond her years, well educated and advised.
After dark, however, the dreadful certainty would grow on him that, yes, she was all these things but she was more. Then she would send for him, and his feet would walk him to the Imperial chambers, desire and hunger making a slave of him. He would drink with her, the salt red wine, and in the antechamber would lie the ruin of some slave or servant, or some courtier who had misspoken or plotted against the crown. He had stopped looking now, since the first time he had recognized a victim. He was a general of the Rekef, inured to death and torture, but the expressions on those exsanguinated faces, the contortions of their pale limbs, affected him somewhere subconscious and primal. There had been a time when his kinden had lived in huts and feared the dark for good reason.
But he needed her, though. It was not love any more. His loins and his heart were chained to her, leaping at her least command. The base man in him was enslaved, while the Rekef general railed. He could not live in such a manner. He needed to redress the balance in their relationship and — just as to get rid of Thalric he had engineered the sacking of a city — so, to take back the reins of his private life, he needed to recreate the Empire’s hierarchy with himself at the top, the power behind the throne, just as it always should have been.
There were too many close to the throne now who were beyond his influence. The Empress chose advisers that Brugan did not know, or she bought loyalty with favour and promotions, or sought the counsel of foreigners such as all those Moths and other mystic rabble who had become so common at court recently. Brugan had been elbowed further and further away from the commanding position he had intended for himself.
He had the Rekef, though, and he had others too, who felt they were owed more for the work they had put into bringing Seda’s Empire about. This would be no different from any other large-scale intrigue he had been involved in. Had he not masterminded her accession to the throne? Taking the substance of her power from her should be easier than plotting in the shadow of her paranoid brother.
Whenever he made such promises to himself, something twisted inside him and fear roamed the hinterlands of his mind, raising its jaws to the moon and rattling its wings. Seda was not just a sharp young girl, it howled. She knew things, saw things, She had a power over people — himself included — that was neither Art nor skill but something else. The fact that she drank blood, he could have put down to the casual cruelty appropriate to the Imperial throne, could perhaps even have made of it a virtue, symbolic of the Empire’s own thirst for conquest. Some traitor part of his mind whispered that it was no mere whim of hers, or even a simple crazed need — a little madness did not necessarily make for a worse Empress — and that she drank blood because it gave her power somehow, that it fuelled her as surely as Nemean mineral oil fuelled the Air Corps’ new orthopters.
But Brugan was a rational man, believing in the physical world, and when he turned the lamps up high he could banish such subversive speculation and continue drawing up his list of who must disappear, who must see the inside of an interrogation room before being politely asked to change their allegiance, or who must be awarded a key post. It was a simple thing for a man of his abilities to turn poacher and devise just the sort of treason the Rekef Inlander was supposed to guard against.
Tonight. It must start tonight. She had not called for him, and the lamps were bright, and he had sent out a summons to those that he considered his allies, men who would cling to the hem of his cloak as he elevated himself, who were wronged or ambitious or just plain greedy, but men who, most of all, were his.
It held an odd mirror to the gathering that the Empress had presided over earlier, such was Esmail’s first impression. Many of the faces were the same: there was General Brugan, and there, as if to balance Harvang’s gross physicality, was the pinpoint neatness of Colonel Vecter, who had also brought along a couple of aides. Knowles Bellowern of the Consortium was there, too, the only non-Wasp and looking wholly unsettled by the business, whatever was going on. There was no Colonel Lien of the Engineers, no army generals — they were out in the field after all — but another half-dozen had taken their place, men younger than Brugan but old enough to have chosen a side and invested their power in a particular way of life. Ostrec’s memories allowed Esmail to recognize many of them by sight: Rekef mostly, but with a couple from the Consortium and one who was a steward at the palace.
