‘The blood-drinkers, Gjegevey, practitioners of a magic that you yourself have decried. I don’t hold the Moths out as paragons of virtue, but surely…’ She was watching him through narrowed eyes.
‘We took no part,’ he repeated.
‘So what was it that brought your… warriors? Did your people even possess such? What brought you into the war against the Worm?’
‘Yes, we had warriors,’ Gjegevey murmured, so quietly that she could barely hear. ‘Our, hm, our Sentinels had mail that was the envy of the world, and we fought. You do not believe me, with only my example before you, but we fought.’ Before she could press her questions, he looked up, eyes abruptly sharp. ‘Would you see, Majesty?’
She stared at him, and Tisamon quivered slightly, responding to her frustration.
‘The Seal of the Worm, Majesty,’ Gjegevey went on, a strange tone to his voice. ‘Or one of them. I can take you to it.’
To Seda it always seemed that for her to leave Capitas was like having to set in motion an avalanche. Her word was law, her mere whim the driving force behind all the lives around her, but even she could not make these things happen fast. The Imperial bureaucracy gathered pace around her, sending advance scouts and guards, forming her entourage, requisitioning vehicles and in all other ways ensuring that her course was as smooth as possible, if not as swift.
At the edge of her notice was the fact that many of the faces — those that shuffled the deck of her staff and set out the new patterns required to get her where she wanted to go — had changed recently. The palace seemed to have suffered some subtle catastrophe, and the men brought in to replace the fallen or lost all had a certain look, almost a taste to them.
But she told herself she would come back to that. She would first see what it was that Gjegevey wished to show her, and she would judge him on it, and if this escapade turned out to be one more attempt merely to turn her aside, then she would deal with the old man once and for all. Not without regret, it was true, but she could not allow herself to be manipulated, not any more. She had lived through enough of that before her brother died.
The salt mine at Coretsy had changed hands a few times in the Empire’s history, being sufficiently far north and east from Myna that the Beetle-kinden there had not been able to prevent the Wasps walking in and taking it over when the winds of politics and war had blown that way. Recently the Mynans had reclaimed it as part of their sovereign territory, under the acclaimed Treaty of Gold, but as the Mynans were currently not even holding on to Myna, their control over the mine had also lapsed. Still, it was a surprising and risky move for the Empress, so the number of Wasp soldiers that descended upon the tiny community outnumbered the entire local population several times over.
Alighting from her airship — a small, swift craft that had flown with a half-dozen Spearflights to escort it — Seda saw only a handful of buildings raised in a style that recalled somewhat the low, half-underground dwellings of Bee-kinden, but with rounded roofs, so that from overhead they might be mistaken for little hills. The entry to the mine itself could have swallowed any of the buildings easily, and drew the eye away from such meagre dwellings. The gaping portal was set into a hillside, a maw twelve feet high sloping down into the earth.
Coretsy was thronging with her soldiers, but there was a welcoming committee of locals there too, who stood out by virtue of most of them being twice as tall as the Wasps. Mole Crickets, she saw, and should have expected as much, for they were the best miners, and the Empire shipped them in wherever hard work needed to be done. About waist level to the pitch-skinned giants clustered a knot of others, mostly Beetle-kinden, though they looked subtly different to the sophisticated Capitas breed Seda was used to seeing.
‘So, this is who gets condemned to the salt mines, is it?’ she asked Gjegevey as she strode out from under the airship’s shadow, the old man hobbling after her, with Tisamon’s metal silence bringing up the rear.
‘Ah, no, your Majesty,’ the Woodlouse-kinden corrected her almost urgently. ‘They are, hm, not slaves, nor are they sent nor forced, ah
…’ He was losing his breath, unable to keep up with her confident stride, and she found herself suddenly face to face with the delegation of locals. There was a fraction of a pause, very obvious to her, before they knelt, not quite in unison. The Mole Crickets amongst them were still taller than her, even in obeisance.
There was a commonality about them, she noticed, the Beetles and the Crickets. It was as though they had been glazed in the same kiln. A film of white had settled on them, into the creases of their lined faces, in the folds of their clothes. Salt.
‘These mines have been worked for… a, hm, long time. More than Myna and the, hem, Empire has claimed them over the years. Mosquitos, yes. Moth-kinden, certainly,’ Gjegevey huffed, catching up. ‘These men are of mining families; their ancestors served the Moths a thousand years ago, hm, no doubt. It is a proud calling. A mystery.’
Seda was about to respond with some flippant rejoinder calculated to restore her place at the heart of the universe, but another look at these men gave her pause. They had a gravity, a history to them that Gjegevey’s words only scratched the surface of. Beetles and Mole Crickets, yes, but there was a scent of the Old Times about them such as she had never known from the Apt. She had thought that working in a salt mine would be a punishing experience, something that destroyed men, but the miners before her seemed hardened, preserved almost, few of them young and yet all of them strong.
‘Show me what you have brought me here for,’ she ordered, and Gjegevey twitched and bowed, and went shuffling past the kneeling miners, with Seda in his wake and Tisamon following like a steel shadow. As her soldiers moved to accompany her, she held a hand up to halt them.
‘No further,’ she told them. ‘Await my return.’
‘But Majesty-’ began their captain.
‘Should I fear? These are my subjects.’ Her gesture encompassed the miners. In truth it was no great risk, for Tisamon would brook no harm to her, and she trusted his reflexes more than all the soldiers of the Empire. Still the captain hovered reluctantly, and she read strange things in the uppermost level of his mind. Not a concern for her wellbeing, not a devotion to his duty, but a need to know so that reports could be made. He was one of the new men, she realized.
Well, your paymaster shall remain ignorant. ‘You will stay here,’ she ordered, and then turned and followed Gjegevey into the gloom of the mine.
The lights of the Coretsy mine burned with green and blue flames leaping behind glass. Gjegevey had explained that more sophisticated lighting suffered too much from the salt that ate into machinery, so that much of the mine working was still done in ways that the Moth-kinden of old would have recognized. Even so, there were rails set into the floor, and she could hear the deep thump of pumps. Their path took them away from the sounds of machinery and picks. The miners no longer worked the gallery that Gjegevey was leading her to, nor had they for longer than any records showed.
‘And I can take it that it was not simply because they ran out of salt,’ Seda remarked drily.
‘Majesty we are, mn, surrounded by salt: the walls, the ceiling.’ He managed a wan smile. ‘Taste, if you, ah, do not believe me.’
Two miners were waiting ahead by some manner of device, one of them a Beetle holding a spitting, greenish-purple lantern. The other, standing in his shadow, was a slender creature, pale-skinned, blank eyed: a Moth-kinden. Seda raised an eyebrow at Gjegevey, but he simply stepped onto a platform on the contraption, and she realized that it must be some manner of lift.
When she had joined him — and reluctantly now, for this sort of travel did not suit her — the lamp was passed to Gjegevey. Once Tisamon was at her shoulder, some unseen signal sent their platform plummeting into darkness.
‘Yes, there are, hm, Moths here,’ his quiet voice said, as they descended. ‘They are the descendants of the overseers, the masters. They dwell entirely within the earth and seldom venture above. This is a place of power, just as you, ah, sought, but I will try to persuade you to look elsewhere. All the, hm, power that the salt and its traditions can muster is committed to what you are about to behold.’
Without warning, the narrow shaft they had been dropping through was gone, the walls opening into a cavern so broad that the lantern light barely scraped its sides, glittering on them, dreamlike, with unnatural colours. Gjegevey held it out at the full length of his thin arm, tilted so that the light fell below them, even as the lift swung and jolted, swinging in a wide spiral as it slowed.
Seda looked down. There, not quite directly beneath them, was what she had come to see. There was no
