All too soon, the great doorway of the museum stood before him. There were no guards, which he knew must be unusual. He guessed that, for nights such as this when the Empress was in residence, the fewer witnesses the better.
He shivered, but it was Ostrec’s shiver as well. A little nervousness here would not be out of place, save only that it would not simply be acting.
He went inside.
The entrance hall was devoted to the Wasps’ own savage past, which they had contrived to make appear as ancient as the crumbling cities of the Nem. Esmail knew well that three generations back the Wasps had been living that savagery; indeed, they had barely tamed it even now, and the North-Empire still had its share of feuding hill tribes chafing at Capitas’s leash. Here were the ranked spears and tattered banners of the tribes that Seda’s grandfather had subjugated along the road to Empire. Here was the old armour, just leather and wood and chitin, but the banded construction presaging the shape of things to come. The impression was one of fecund and violent exuberance. The Wasps may have distanced themselves from that past, but they romanticized it as well. Stories set in those days of the fierce and the free were all the rage, just now.
There was no sign of Seda or any other living soul, and he passed on between the serried ranks of barbarism into the next chamber. Here, guttering lamps lit the spoils of the Twelve-year War. The walls were sheathed in screens and tapestries and woven silk depicting idylls of the Commonweal, and now the hill-tribe savagery gave way to simple tragedy: ranks and ranks of enamelled armour, the chitin and fine mail of Dragonfly princes and nobles, their bright colours muted in the dim light. Here were their incomparable bows, their narrow-headed spears, their long-hafted swords. Here — and Esmail paused, despite himself, to study it — was a map of some engagement or other, with tiny wooden soldiers standing in their battalions, demonstrating the invincibility of the Imperial war machine. A plaque explained that every single figure on both sides had been carved by Commonweal slave artisans. Esmail nodded: it fitted what he understood of the Empire and its cruel poetry. It fitted the Commonweal, too, for the slaves had plainly poured into those tiny symbols of their own defeat all the artistry and skill that they would have expended on a tribute to their own lords and ladies. For a moment he had a sudden rending sense of loss, wondering where his wife was, whether their children were safe, whether he would ever see them again.
When he looked up, she was there, the Empress Seda, flanked by two Mantis-kinden women in Imperial colours, clawed gauntlets ready to hand.
‘Ah, Estrec,’ she said, and the blood froze in his veins. She knows. She’s unmasked me already. For a moment he was in mad turmoil within his mind, and only the automatic mettle of his long training kept Ostrec’s face and form in place. He could not vouch for his expression, but Ostrec himself, discovered unexpectedly by his Empress in that place, would have lost something of his composure too.
She does not know, he insisted to himself. Seda approached him, smiling, her eyes seeming to pierce wherever they rested.
‘You must wonder why I show such interest in you, a lowly quartermaster major,’ she murmured.
She does not know. He read her expression, as much as he dared, like stealing glimpses at the sun. If she was playing a double game, he could see none of it there. Sweating despite the cool of the night, he forced himself back into his role. And Ostrec would react how…?
Ostrec would assume she had called him here because he was young and handsome and strong. The real Ostrec saw women as having a simple outlook on the world. He would look at Seda and smile, oblivious to all the occult strength that Esmail could feel radiating from her.
Esmail produced that same smile: lean, a little predatory and horribly out of place. It was the hardest thing he had done.
‘You interest me, Ostrec,’ she told him, using the right name this time, and he saw that she did not realize how she had misspoken before. It was no simple mistake, though. He was willing to bet that Seda did not make simple mistakes. To his awe and horror, he realized that some deep part of her, some subconscious monitor, really had pierced his disguise and seen him, even somehow divined his name. Give Seda another few years and she would learn to listen to that inner voice, and be even more dangerous and indomitable than she already was. For now, though, a lifetime of being deaf and blind to the magical world still chained her. For now.
And this is why the Moths sent me to kill her now.
‘I am honoured,’ he let Ostrec reply. ‘Your Majesty, tell me what I might to do please you.’ Esmail was calmer now, feeling out the limits of his situation, feeling three layers of Ostrec rub against one another inside his mind: the man’s private thoughts, the pawn in Brugan’s covert game and the public face that he was projecting to Seda.
‘I collect people who interest me,’ she told him, and abruptly turned away, not at all the reaction Ostrec had been expecting, ‘if they prove to be truly interesting, if they do not disappoint.’ She was striding off, away from the relics of the Twelve-year War, her bodyguards gliding silently along with her. Esmail started Ostrec’s feet on the same path, managing the hesitation and little stumble that he knew the man would make after being so wrong- footed.
The Empress paused a moment, gazing into a side-chamber as he caught her up. He risked a glance and saw a work in progress, statues still in open crates and great slabs of stone faced with hundreds of little sigils. Khanaphes, he realized. Of course, the Empire had added the ancient city to its holdings recently, and here were the spoils already. This museum was the Empire in miniature, a tally of its conquests.
‘What do you see?’ Seda asked him. ‘What does Khanaphes mean to you, Ostrec?’
‘Your latest triumph,’ he hazarded, but he felt the ground beneath his feet suddenly uncertain. If they do not disappoint, she had said, and he felt on the verge of disappointing her. We come back to this: Why Ostrec? What has she seen in him, to summon him here?
‘Does Khanaphes speak to you?’ she asked him. ‘What does it say?’
Again Ostrec’s glib answer welled up within him, but he fought it down, very conscious that those would be the wrong words. She collects people who interest her. What most interests the Empress of the Wasps these days?
Magic…
Esmail felt something lurch within him, his balance momentarily failing. ‘I feel power,’ he said, conscious that his chance to answer had almost passed. ‘Old power, but power nonetheless. I cannot explain it.’ It was not what Ostrec would have said. He was improvising, because what Seda had seen within Ostrec was Esmail.
His skills hid him well. Even a skilled Skryre, if caught unawares, might not be able to penetrate his guises. Still, there was a taint about him, the inescapable bleedings of magic. Seda had looked on Ostrec and seen a dimension to him that normal Wasp-kinden lacked. He was aware that he was on very dangerous ground now. He had no idea what a woman in her position might do with the man she took him for. There must be a few Wasps around with a little of the old blood in them, from half-breedings generations back, or perhaps even survivals from ancient days when the Wasps, too, were Inapt and had some rough type of magician amongst them. From her manner he guessed now that she had gone through this charade before. What had been the outcome? Or had they all disappointed her before? Was all this just some elaborate prequel to a bloodletting?
She led him on, and they continued through all the memorabilia of the Empire’s triumphs, all the detritus of its subject races: tapestries, statues, pottery and art, and always the arms and armour of the defeated, still holed and dented and scorched where the Wasp-kinden had enforced their superiority.
When she stopped he had slowed already, because ahead he sensed what must be her destination. Again he wondered that there could be such power at all, here within the city of the Apt, but he knew it was solely through Seda’s own doing, and that she must feed it regularly. The sense of the place ahead was not strong in comparison with the sources of the Moth-kinden power he was used to, but it was flowering in such hostile soil here. Its character was disconcerting and unwholesome, a mingling of the shadow-stuff the Moths liked with something even darker. He thought he could scent the faint copper smell of blood upon the air.
Seeing him react, Seda smiled. ‘And they said you were cocky,’ she murmured.
He had a stab of panic, thinking that he had dropped his mask somehow, but he saw that his hesitation and solemnity here were exactly what she would expect of Ostrec — if Ostrec had been what she took him for. In responding as he was, he was confirming himself as an object of interest rather than a disappointment.
She turned, and stepped into the next hall, past a curtain that one of her guard had drawn aside. For a moment his instincts warred within him: he knew he must not step within, and yet he knew that it was death to
