turn aside now, a more certain death but perhaps a cleaner one.
But he wanted to know. He wanted to see. He stepped inside.
The walls of the small, windowless chamber had been covered with dead vines and branches, nailed up everywhere to form an ersatz grove, a cage of withered wood. A few dim lanterns hidden amongst the twisted, interlacing boughs provided the only light Seda allowed within.
No arms and armour here, no exhibits, nothing for public edification. Instead there was only one piece of history in the room, and it was not the Empire’s. Eight feet tall and formed of rotting, insect-infested wood, it was an effigy, a crude mantis shape: a single warped upright reaching almost to the ceiling, with two crooked arms. Esmail knew the pattern well. Wherever the Mantis-kinden made their homes, somewhere, in the darkest inner glade furthest from foreign eyes, there would be some nasty piece of work like this. Where Seda might have acquired such a ritual figure, he did not know, but he knew that the ancient Mantis traditions fed them with death and blood, and those traditions had not been overly encouraged by that race’s Moth masters. It would seem that Seda had resurrected the practice, and from that he guessed that she had probably secured the loyalty of her bodyguards until death and perhaps beyond.
Then there was movement all around. The criss-crossing of the branches, the overwhelming presence of the idol, had blinded him to the fact that the room was already occupied.
Conspirators, he thought immediately, contrasting them with Brugan’s fellow plotters, but he knew in a moment there was a better word. There were four of them here, all Wasp-kinden men and nothing special — none of them looked like high-ranking officers, although perhaps not simple soldiers either. He mentally labelled them — slaver, two sergeants and a Consortium clerk — without much justification.
They were waiting for him to step deeper into the room, which would leave the Empress and her guards in the doorway, barring his retreat. It seemed to him, though, that he had already taken too many steps just by coming here. A few more would make no difference.
He went in.
‘Ostrec, what has your life been to date?’ the Empress’s soft voice asked him, from over his shoulder. ‘Have you found the world empty, unfulfilling. Have you drunk your fill of rank and ambition, and yet remained thirsty? Have you always known that there was more to life, lurking at the edge of vision, in the shadows, on the far side of the mirror?’
And the answer was ‘no’, of course, as far as the real Ostrec’s memories went, but if he had possessed some atavistic spark of the old ways, then no doubt all that would have been true. Esmail studied the men around him, and in those Wasps, yes, perhaps there was some taint, some residual sense of discontinuity that hinted at an unsettled heritage. It was pitifully little, but then the Wasps had been an Apt kinden for generation on generation, so it was surprising that even these dregs were left.
He realized that he had nodded, at Seda’s words, and there was a scuffle from behind him. He turned quickly, stepping away from the doorway, ending up almost shoulder to shoulder with the slaver. A newcomer had arrived, but not willingly, for two of the Mantis-kinden were manhandling him, his arms bound behind his back. He was a middle-aged Wasp, and Esmail picked out his face from Ostrec’s memories, identifying him as a Consortium man in Brugan’s pay, just a little cog in the Rekef general’s army of informants.
‘Ostrec!’ the man shouted. ‘Help me!’
Esmail glanced at the Empress, whom he realized was observing him closely.
‘I will open the doors of your world.’ Her voice was gentle, yet the shouting of the bound man could not eclipse it. ‘Only follow your instincts, and I will show you what the absence is that has gnawed at your life. I will fill you.’
Could I have killed her in the museum before? He wondered if she had given him the chance to fulfil his mission as they passed through the galleries: to cut her down and then flee her guards, all the way back to the phalanstery near Tharn. I could even strike now. A moment is all I need, and they are not ready for it. I would die, but perhaps the death of the Empress is worth one killer’s blood.
But they were empty thoughts, because she had already reached him in the way that she intended. Esmail the spy was as caught up in her as she had meant Ostrec to be, for different reasons. What could she not do, this woman? A Magician-Empress seeking to transform the world.
The bound man had been forced to his knees in the very shadow of the Mantis icon, and it required no special intuition to see what must now be done. Esmail extended a hand, just as a Wasp should, reaching for Ostrec’s Art. To mimic Art was hard, a real test of a spy’s skill, and he would not have wanted to try this against a moving target, but the Mantis-kinden were holding their victim very still, with so little apparent effort.
At the last moment he stopped himself, knowing it was wrong. Not mercy, not morality, but wrong by the rules that Seda was playing with. No cauterizing fire here. She wanted blood.
When he held his hand out for the knife, he sensed a change in them all, a measure of acceptance not present a moment before. Only then did he realize that he had passed a test — one he had been on the very brink of failing merely by playing his stolen role too well.
The eyes of his victim beseeched him, and he watched the man’s mouth open and shut, calling his borrowed name. One of the Mantids dragged back on the prisoner’s head by the hair, baring his throat for Esmail’s blade.
A moment’s hesitation would pass muster, for Ostrec the quartermaster was not a habitual killer, and Ostrec the Rekef man was still supposed to be a secret. In himself, Esmail found he cared little enough about one more dead Wasp, but a sacrifice in this place, in this company, would unleash a power that he had no say over. He would be doing her will, feeding her fire.
He made it quick, professional — and to the pits with what Ostrec would have done. One of the Mantids caught the first of the blood in a chalice as it spilled. The rest was allowed to run over the floor. He could not help but notice that the stone seemed to suck it up, unnatural and greedy. The reek of blood in the air was sharp as spices, and he felt dizzy and nauseous with it. He could feel the rotten wood of the idol sating its thirst.
The chalice was pressed into his hands, and he now understood. He was a spy, not some great magician. His talents were great within his own narrow field, but this was beyond him. He had not seen the trap until its jaws began closing on him.
‘Drink, and be one of my chosen,’ Seda told him. ‘Cast off all other loyalties; be bound to me, and become greater than you were. Drink.’
And they were not empty words. Symbols had power. As a man talented in all manner of evasion and misdirection, he might be able to sidestep the worst, but there would be hooks in him, once he drank. What he yielded to the Empress here could never be fully regained. She would have a hold on him. In some sense, no matter the distance, no matter how he twisted and turned, he would remain hers.
He could refuse, and they would ensure that his blood would be the next offered to the idol. Would such a death be preferably to a life ensnared by this hybrid blood-and-shadow magic that the Empress was building?
But something twisted in him: Did we not want this? Would the Moths not do this if they could? This is power! Here in the heart of Capitas, in the Empire of the Apt, this is power. If there was ever to be some rebirth of the old days, how else but this way? He looked at the Empress, and saw that she was young and beautiful and strong and bold. Why not her? Where are my loyalties now?
He drank, and could only trust to his own skills to keep him free — of Seda and the Moths both. The blood was bitter and fierce. It tasted of power.
Twenty-Three
The second air attack on Collegium inflicted considerably more damage than the first. Logistics — which the Beetles had always counted themselves so skilled at — had failed them utterly. There were simply too many jobs to be done, too few pilots to do them.
It had become plain to all that the Wasps had somehow established an airfield within striking distance of the city. Even with the advantage of fixing their wings for additional range, they must still be within a certain radius of Collegium’s walls. Whilst the aviation faculty met to draw circles on maps and argue about flight times, Taki and the other pilots were set to searching an ever-increasing span of countryside. It was bare, sparse terrain, and what
