histories of the Inapt made for tortuous reading for one brought up only on lists of battles and generals. Everything was allusion and metaphor, or perhaps it was not metaphor but myth. Or perhaps the myths were being set down as absolute truth. Nothing was plain, or else everything was plain and nothing was believable. ‘Were the times so very different back then? Monsters and fires from the sky, and conjuring the bones of the earth? What happened to it all?’
‘Theories differ.’ When Gjegevey spoke, his voice held more sadness than usual, a reverent and wistful tone. ‘My people, hm, these days we mostly believe that it is simply that magic’s time has waned, and is still waning, as the turn of the moon leads to darker nights, so some great and, hem, invisible wheel has taken us away from those days when a magician might, ah, hold the world in the palm of his hand. Some day it is to be hoped the, eh, wheel may turn all the way, and magic shall wax once more. For now, though, we are left with only shallows where once the sea rolled.’
‘Poetic, but a mixed metaphor,’ Seda grumbled. With nobody else was she so informal as with Gjegevey. He had been one of her earliest supporters but, more than that, he had been someone who had been willing to associate with her back before her brother’s death, when the executioner’s shadow hung constantly over her. She was fonder of him than she would admit. ‘So tell me some other theory… no, I know it. The Apt.’
‘The Moth-kinden favour it.’
‘The Apt came with their revolutions,’ Seda murmured. ‘Uprisings in Pathis, in Myna. But it must be more than that. The Masters had already sealed themselves away in Khanaphes long before, and there was never a Commonweal revolution. The Spiders still hold their lands in thrall, but mostly without magic. Perhaps the Apt could take control of their own destiny because magic was not what it had once been, even then. And now…’ She hissed through her teeth. ‘But there are places where it has clung on, Gjegevey. We know there are. The power of the Darakyon touched me. It set me on this path, but it’s gone now, nothing but a stand of twisted trees. I refuse to believe that there is nowhere else.’
‘The Darakyon was an evil place, Majesty,’ Gjegevey whispered.
She gave him a level look. ‘Evil is a word for those we wish our histories to damn. And, besides, where are all the magical places of sweetness and light, old man? Gone, if they were ever there. It would seem that which you term evil has at least one virtue: it abides.’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘I have lived most of my life in fear. You know that. Now there is some small chance this unlooked for gift will give me control of my own destiny. What is morality against that?’
‘And the destiny of the Empire?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Or just your own?’
‘Do you honestly think they are not one and the same? Any other theories, old man?’
She did not expect any, so he surprised her by saying, ‘Just the one: that the Inapt, ah, destroyed themselves.’
She stared down at the page before her, with its dense recitals. ‘There are a lot of wars in these old histories,’ she allowed. ‘Or I thought perhaps they were not wars but some other meaning dressed up as war.’
‘There were a great many wars,’ Gjegevey confirmed, ‘but they were wars of a scale and a style that your kinden might not have recognized them as such. Conflicts lasting decades, centuries even. If artifice sends your wars on swift wasps’ wings, think of the old days as snails’ wars, slow grappling, histories of skirmishes and shifts, no less fierce but utterly alien. One could have lived all one’s life within such a war and not known it.’
‘Wars for what?’
‘For control. In the grand old days of magic, the elite few who understood it all fought wars to control the future, warring ideologies that spawned earthly battlefields. The Moths, they were the greatest, in the end, which is why it is their histories that you read now. By their own claims, they saved the world from a multitude of evils, so, perhaps they used up their magic, weakened themselves so greatly that their slaves could cast them off. But you know all this.’
‘I am not sure what I know,’ she replied, but his words crystallized a certainty within her. ‘Their great wars… the Coup of the Assassins, the Purge of the Mosquito-kinden.’
‘We record them as true.’ Gjegevey ventured a smile. ‘Of course we record many, hm, fantastical things as true, but those conflicts were real. There is evidence.’
She remained silent a long time, after that, where he had expected her either to press for more details or to pass on to some other subject. She was not reading, either. The book beneath her hands passed unnoticed.
At last she said, ‘Gjegevey… there were other conflicts.’
‘Many,’ he agreed, ‘and in all, ehm, probability many that even my people did not record. The past is a deep well, and in those days there were ways to drive an enemy to the very edge of oblivion, even..’ He stuttered to a halt, for she was staring at him intently.
‘Yes…?’ she prompted.
He shrugged as if to suggest he had been merely rambling, that she should pay no heed.
Without looking, her quick hands turned pages until she was near the end of the book’s legible section. The pages there were water-marked, worm-eaten and frayed. ‘What is this, then? For, of all things in this overwritten textbook, this has no legend, no explanation. Just one symbol on a page, and yet I feel…’
She stopped, for Gjegevey had drawn away. His face was always pale, and now discoloured by the lamplight, but she would swear that he had become even more ashen, and something leapt within her breast.
‘The Seal of the Worm,’ he whispered on the edge of hearing, as though against his will. She sensed him struggling with himself, read his mind, almost, seeing him weighing whether he could convince her that it was nothing, just some scholar’s idle sketch.
‘Yes,’ he admitted at last, reluctantly, ‘you have found the edges of a hole that the Moths have eaten through history in order to erase an ancient foe. But, Majesty, hear me. If you ever valued my counsel, if you ever thought me wise, look no further in that direction, I beg you.’ His voice had changed, lost its vague mannerisms, become like a sword. She actually drew back from him, from this new, changed creature.
On the page before her, the symbol, a crooked spiral hatched with a hundred tiny lines, seemed to writhe.
‘I shall consider the matter,’ she said, and knew it to be at least a partial acquiescence. She closed the book. She had read enough for one day.
Esmail planned his route carefully so that he had some distance between himself and the Imperial Museum, when he first came in sight of it, viewing it down a long gas-lit avenue lined with grand buildings, factora and offices of the various divisions of the Wasp administration. The museum itself was almost finished, its shape an awkward compromise between aesthetic and functional. The usual ziggurat shape the Wasps preferred — stone copies of the hill forts their ancestors had lived in — had been expanded outward in wings, to allow sufficient space within for all the anticipated exhibits.
A shadow fell on his heart as he saw it. That was the only way he could describe the sensation to himself. He had not seen the building before, his path had not brought him here, but not until now did he realize that some part of him had been avoiding it.
Power. In a city of the Apt, the sense was weak, but someone had been eroding away at the heavy hand of disbelief that held the rest of the city in thrall. Esmail was willing to bet that there would be little of the new to be found, within those walls — no complex artifice in the lighting, no machines, no Imperial efficiency — just hall after hall devoted to the subjugated, and so many of them Inapt. The vast bulk of Capitas’s populace would be blind and deaf to it, but Esmail could almost see a brooding cloud hanging over the place. Power indeed, and of no sort that was healthy to be around.
Although, now I consider it, is any of it healthy? The Dragonfly-kinden, perhaps, but is that why their magic has atrophied so much, even by modern standards, until their great and ancient state is nothing but an eggshell ready for crushing? The Moths know: the light of the sun is for the Apt. We cannot bear its touch any more. We need doubt and fear and shadows. That is where the magic endures.
Doubt and fear and shadows practically shrouded the Imperial Museum.
Still, a summons from the Empress could not be ignored. I must trust to my skills. Beginning the long walk towards that looming edifice, he shored up the walls of his mind like a lord looking over the defences of his fortress, ensuring that the inner Esmail and the outer Ostrec were in alignment, so that everything he did, everything he thought, would he filtered only through that stolen persona.
If she suspects… But he was counting on her not being able to apply her great power with the precision that piercing his mask would require.
