‘Of course you do. Sometimes I envy how simple your desires are, how easily satisfied. She stepped towards him like a dancer, feeling the chill of his dead eyes on her bare skin. ‘You would kill us all — all of my kinden — I know.’ For in life he had hated Wasps, which made her taming of him all the sweeter.
Not you. Never you. She stood well within his reach now, and his bladed gauntlet was donned. A single swift strike, far faster than she could react to, and she would follow her brother and Uctebri into the final dark. She reached out and touched the elegant lines of his mail, following the contours of his carapace. Oh, he was bound to her, and eagerly he followed her commands, but it was not a soldier’s loyalty that moved him, nor a slavish obedience, but something stronger and weaker than either. The closest word language had for it was love, but what could such a dreadful thing as this revenant make of that idea? She had bound him by holding his blade that was a part of him through the mysteries of the Weaponsmasters. She had bound him by feeding him blood, and she continued to do so, to keep him strong and close. All that was just the foundation, though, preliminaries that had allowed her to open negotiations with his will. She had bound him after that with promises to the heart of his Inapt nature — Inapt by kinden, and Inapt by his very existence now — that she and only she might bring back the old days when magic, and his people, were strong.
Greatest of all, though, she had bound him by understanding the razor edges of his true nature, seeing where they would bend and twist until he was a weapon that would fit her hand only. Passion and death made up the essence of Tisamon. He had been a hero fit for all the old Mantis romances, tragic and doomed and bloody-handed. So it was that what he felt for her was something like love and, if she handled him poorly, if she took a false step in toying with his bitter feelings, he might kill her despite — because of — all the chains of magic that linked them.
And if I take him to my bed? The thought was irresistible. It was possible, she suspected, but the old stories were full of those who had been lured to lie with a ghost, and had found only death. The fools in the tales were all in love themselves, though, and Seda had no such vulnerability. The thought only excited her, and it would bind the revenant to her all the more thoroughly, for good or for ill.
She nearly gave in to the temptation there and then, because there was a challenge that she could meet with her eyes open — not like the sly, sneaking threat that the Beetle girl posed. But, no, she had summoned Gjegevey, after all, and if the old man walked in on that it might kill him. She smirked at the thought, for a moment just a Wasp girl of good family treasuring a risque thought. Then her main purpose returned to her, the lurking presence of the other, and her need to secure some source of strength that Cheerwell Maker could not touch. Gjegevey was being coy with her, she knew, holding back information because he thought he knew what was best for her. She would have to disabuse him of that notion.
If only she could simply send Tisamon after the wretched Beetle girl, but she knew that would only lose her his services, for the Maker girl had already driven off the revenant before. Unless Seda was close to prevent it, she would do so again, or banish him, or even wrest control of him from Seda’s hands. Such tools as the Mantis ghost were best used against more mundane enemies. Any work of magic was vulnerable to a magician, just as (she supposed) any mechanical weapon would fall prey to the enemy’s artificers, could they but get hold of it.
There was an almost inaudible scratch at the door, Gjegevey announcing his presence. She shrugged into a robe to spare his stammers, and called for him to enter.
He shuffled in, hunched and grey-skinned, old but sufficiently distant from Wasp-kinden humanity that it was impossible to date him. He wore a robe of Imperial hues today, halved black and gold like an Auxillian’s uniform.
‘It’s time,’ she told him, as soon as he had closed the door behind him.
‘Ah, Majesty?’ Always the vague old man, but she had known him too long to be fooled. He was as keen as a knife behind the wrinkles and the rheumy eyes.
‘The Seal of the Worm, you called it,’ she told him, ‘and to me that said power. Something the Moths kept to themselves, all those years ago, almost completely excised from those writings that they let out into the wider world. They didn’t think that my people would conquer their roost at Tharn, though, and seize some few of their precious scrolls. The Seal of the Worm, Gjegevey.’ Her hand traced the spiral that she remembered, crooking into a claw for the tridentine blot that had formed the centrepiece.
The old man was silent for a moment, still only a step inside the door. ‘Majesty,’ he said at last, his voice soft and steady, ‘you know I am your loyal servant, and have been for perhaps longer than any other. Trust my wisdom on this: you do not want to meddle with it. There is no victory to be had over the Worm. There will be other secrets, but not this one. Trust me, your Majesty.’
Seda nodded as though considering this, and then: ‘Kill him,’ she said and, without pausing for breath, ‘Stop!’
In that eyeblink Tisamon had travelled almost all the way across the room towards Gjegevey, claw upraised. Her last word brought the Mantis to a halt perhaps a foot beyond striking distance. Seda watched Gjegevey’s face, the eyes gone wide, the jaw slack, staring at the tip of Tisamon’s metal claw glinting in the morning light. Not so old, then, that death does not hold a little terror for him. Well, it was a lesson he had to learn.
‘I value you, old man,’ Seda said lightly. ‘You were my friend when I had no friends. You say rightly that you were my first supporter. I treasure your advice and your company, but you must never forget,’ and now the steel entered her tone, ‘you are my servant, my slave if I decided to enforce that status upon you, and I am the Empress of all the Wasps. I will brook no divided loyalties, even if that other mistress you serve is only your idea of what is best for me. Counsel me, advise me, but do not take me for a child. Do not seek to protect me from the world, and most certainly do not seek to protect it from me. Do you understand?’
He nodded, swallowing. ‘I congratulate your Majesty on your, ah, reflexes,’ he murmured, just a dry whisper, no doubt calculating what a small fraction of a second’s delay in her countermanding order would have accomplished. Tisamon had not moved throughout the exchange.
‘There was a war,’ she prompted him. ‘I have gleaned that much. But there were many wars, and they blur into one another. Mosquitos, Assassin Bugs, Spiders — the Moths were always fighting someone. And they never simply write as historians. Everything is metaphor. Except that I can see the gap, the hole they have made, as they censored their own past. The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’
‘Yes,’ Gjegevey agreed heavily. ‘The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’ He gave the words such strange weight that Seda paused for a moment, abandoning her rhetoric.
‘When we were in Khanaphes together, I saw the embassies there. The ancient Masters had entertained ambassadors from all the great powers of their day, and their Beetle servants had maintained that lost past even to the present day.’
Gjegevey nodded glumly, and his eyes flicked to the uplifted blade again. ‘Majesty, may I, ah…’
‘Stand down, Tisamon.’
There was a notable moment of reluctance before the armoured figure lowered its arm and stood back, freezing once again into that brooding Mantis stillness. She would have to have a slave or a prisoner brought up, she knew, for he hated being denied his ration of blood.
‘I saw statues of Moths there,’ Seda continued. ‘Spiders, Dragonflies, Mantis-kinden even. And your people, Gjegevey, ranked as equals. My own kinden were housed in a building that had two of your cousins displayed in stone at the door, and I was given to understand that this was because, when those likenesses were carved, the lands that would become my Empire were yours. Is this true?’
Again that mournful nod and, when her expression hinted at exasperation, he spoke. ‘You have guessed it all or, hm, most of it, I think. Yes, my people had their great days. Yes, there was a, mn, a war that came that we could not stay out of. Yes, after that war we were no longer great, nor have we, ah, ever been so again. The will to change the world was gone from us, hm, after that. We had used it all up in the fight against the Worm.’
‘Worm-kinden,’ she mocked.
‘Ah, no, you know better than that, from your stolen Moth scrolls, from your deciphering of their writings. But the term, the insult, was how they were known from the war, for to the Moths there was ever power in names.’
‘Gjegevey, the Moths had many enemies,’ she told him, and his long face twisted, foreseeing what was coming. ‘The Mosquitos were the greatest threat to their power that they write openly of — or at least as openly as they ever do — and I see that conflict was underway before this… before whatever it was that resulted in the Seal of the Worm. But your own people…?’
‘No,’ Gjegevey whispered, ‘we took no part.’
