Praeda shrugged. ‘You tell me,’ she replied, resting a hand on his arm. ‘These are your people. When I was here last I’d have said that very little the Ministers did made many kinds of sense.’
The foremost Minister standing on the balcony – at this distance just an anonymous old man – held out his hands, and the citizens below quietened swiftly. ‘People of Khanaphes, rejoice!’ he declared, with all apparent sincerity. ‘Rejoice for the friendship of a new Empire!’
The people below did not seem minded to spring into instant celebration, but merely stared upwards cautiously. Praeda guessed many of them would have heard how this selfsame Empire had been behind the ruinous Scorpion attack of the previous year, from which the city was so plainly still recovering. To have such a large Imperial force insert itself effortlessly within their walls caused them understandable concern.
‘The Honoured Foreigners of the Wasp Empire have heard of our troubles,’ the Minister pressed on stoically. ‘They are deeply grieved that renegades from within their own borders may have incited the Scorpions of the Nem to attack our walls.’ Nothing in the Minister’s assured delivery acknowledged just how swiftly those walls had been brought down, or the terrible cost of that assault. Khanaphes, city of ten thousand years, did not like to dwell on its own defeats.
Praeda shifted at the window, wishing she could get her telescope out, but knowing that, at this angle, sunlight might flash from the lens and draw Imperial attention. Amnon had talked his way into this place, the merchant that owned it was surely somewhere in the crowd outside, and she was still worried that word might already have reached the government that their errant son, their former First Soldier, had returned.
‘So it is,’ the Minister was saying, ‘that the Honoured Foreigners wish to make amends. Even today they will be taking their soldiers off into the Nem, with all their fearful artifice, there to confront and slay as many of the despoiling Scorpions as they can find. These foreigners, our friends, shall thus take the blood of the Many in recompense for the harm their rebellious subjects have done here. They tell us that, after they are done, we need not fear the return of the Scorpions for five hundred years!’
For a moment there was silence, as the listeners digested this statement. Then a few scattered cries of approbation heralded the floodgates opening, and a moment later, everyone was cheering – cheering the black and gold. Praeda wondered whether any of it was spontaneous, or whether the Ministers had orchestrated every last echo.
‘This is how they hope to keep the Wasps off their backs, is it?’ she mused aloud.
Amnon hissed, ‘Praeda,’ in warning tones, and a moment later she heard the sound of sandals scuffing on stone steps as several people ascended the stairs from the factora’s ground floor. She turned to see that Amnon had already drawn his sword: a well-crafted Helleron piece, and not the leaf-bladed weapon he had taken away on his departure from this city. She had a similar short blade herself strapped to the inside of the pack lying at her feet, and now she rested a hand on the hilt, waiting.
She had certainly not expected to see Ethmet, but the leading pair of feet to arrive belonged to none other than Khanaphes’s First Minister. The man and woman following him were outfitted in the gorgeous gold-edged scale mail of the Royal Guard, but they themselves looked young and green: surely replacements brought in after the Scorpions had been defeated. Though not amongst those commanded by Amnon during the city’s defence, they still eyed the big man with awe and reverence. Exiled though he was, his name still resonated within the city’s walls.
There was an awkward silence between them that the sound of the crowd outside could not break into. Then Ethmet spoke: ‘They told me you had returned.’
Amnon still held his sword to hand. ‘If you believe that I have come begging for pardon, you are mistaken,’ he stated. ‘If you intend threatening me with the law of Khanaphes for defying my banishment, then you have forgotten who I am. These children will not suffice.’ He looked directly into the faces of Ethmet’s guards. ‘They will not even stand against me.’
‘No, no.’ Ethmet’s voice, that had quieted angry crowds in its time, emerged weak enough that Praeda had to lean closer to hear it. ‘I just came to… to see you. An old friend…’
Amnon frowned suspiciously. ‘You seem to like your new friends well enough to have no need of old ones. We saw you bow the knee.’
‘Amnon, you do not understand.’ The old man’s voice cracked on the last word and, suddenly shaking, his legs gave way. One of his men lunged forward to catch him, and guide him over to a stone bench. To her embarrassment, Praeda saw tears on Ethmet’s withered cheeks.
‘The Masters,’ he got out. ‘The Masters…’
‘There are no Masters,’ Amnon said firmly. He put a lot of conviction into those words, and indeed Praeda had talked with him repeatedly about the archaic beliefs of the Khanaphir. Most of the time, Amnon came across as quite the rationalist Beetle-kinden, interested in machinery and progress and better ways of doing things. She knew him well, though, and there were times when his mind still played host to the superstitions of his upbringing.
‘You are wrong!’ Ethmet hissed. ‘You saw them sweep the Scorpions from the city, at the last.’
‘At the last?’ Amnon demanded hotly. ‘Old man, you had better hope that there are no Masters, for if there are, what manner of creature are they to let their servants suffer so, to see so many of their people die, to see their own army defeated, if all along they possessed such power?’
Amnon obviously expected Ethmet to rally at this, to curse him for his blasphemy, but the old man’s shoulders kept shaking, and his words were momentarily lost as he fought to control himself.
‘I believe in the Masters,’ Ethmet forced out at last, ‘and I believe I have always done their will as best I could. But it is for me as a man hearing the echo of a voice from distant rooms, so perhaps I have not always understood. Perhaps, sometimes, I thought I heard them when they were silent, or they spoke and I did not listen. But. .. I believe in the Masters now. They are awake. They speak, and if I myself can hear only the faintest whisper of their words, she hears them clear, whether she knows it or not. Oh, I knelt, Amnon. I knelt because the Masters told us to, all of us. It was only the echo of an echo, but I have never heard them clearer. I could not have kept a straight leg if I had wished to. She is here because of the Masters, Amnon. She means more to the Masters than do I and all my ancestors together for five hundred years.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Amnon admitted. He glanced at Praeda, who put a hand on his arm, trying to comfort him.
Ethmet was crying quietly again. ‘We have served them all this time. We have done what we thought the Masters… the Masters… what they wanted. We have failed them. We have grown away from them, from generation to generation. We are not fit tools for them, and so they reach out to others: first that Collegium girl, and now the Empress of all the Wasps. Even these foreigners are more beloved of the Masters than we are.’
Amnon and Praeda exchanged uncomfortable looks, on seeing the First Minister of the Khanaphir so comprehensively undone. In Praeda’s mind, though, a phrase resurfaced. ‘That Collegium girl’… Che?
That morning, in her mirror, she had seemed to see another face. She was Seda the First, Empress of the Wasps, a countenance revered and reproduced across the Empire, and yet, for a moment, her pale, fine features had been overlaid by those of a Beetle woman, of all things: a serious-looking girl of close to her own age. Seda had locked eyes with that phantom until it had faded.
It was not the first time, either. She knew the same face from fragmentary dreams, briefly glimpsed in standing water or reflected in glass. Most of the time the face itself went unseen, though, for her own mind’s eye sat behind it and stared out…
Seda had stood on the city’s western walls, those parts that had not been tested by the Imperial ordnance brought against them by the Many of Nem, and watched the Empire’s punitive force set off. It was expected of her, for all that she understood very little of it. It reminded her of that strange little meeting in the Scriptora: the colonel of Engineers, the two disgraced artificers and the Iron Glove’s halfbreed, all talking so knowledgeably about things that she could not understand. Not one of them had guessed at her ignorance or, if they had, they had assumed it was the simple lack of knowledge fitting for someone Apt but untrained. In reality they might as well have been making animal noises when they spoke of their craft, but she had been well briefed. She did not need to know how their machines worked. She only needed to know the result. They might claim to have an engine that would tear down a wall, but all that mattered to her was that the wall fell. She relied on people such as Gjegevey to brief her.
She knew, for example, that an observer from a more mechanically minded city than Khanaphes might wonder about the large quantity of machinery that this punitive force was taking into the desert with it: machinery that would seem to serve little martial purpose. However, once away from the city walls, any such observer would
