‘Why, thank you, Major Varsec.’ Angved plucked from his toolstrip something that had not been particularly intended for extracting corks from bottles, but which artificers had been using for that purpose for two generations. The brandy was darker than blood, rich and smoky on the tongue, burning at the back of the throat.
‘They’re training the new pilots,’ Varsec observed softly, once he had taken a first sip.
Angved remembered that other proposition to be found in Varsec’s little book, regarding the sort of man they would need at the controls of one of his revolutionary new fliers. ‘I didn’t think they’d go for it,’ he said, his tone hushed. ‘You’ve put yourself out of a job, you know. Didn’t you use to be an aviator yourself?’
‘For me, it was never the flying, just the fact of us having the machines. I’ll not miss it,’ Varsec replied, although there was a touch of regret in his voice. ‘Still, there will be plenty of jobs for the old batch of pilots – civilian roles, support roles. It’s just that for our new type of air combat, we need the new type of men.’
His proposals had shocked Angved, visionary to the point of lunacy. ‘It’s going to be a very different place by the time we get home.’
‘It was always going to be,’ Varsec said philosophically. ‘The only difference is that we will have made it so. The future, Angved – we’re making the future right here, you and I. Even if nobody remembers our names, and the historians jabber on about how General Lien and Empress Seda revolutionized the world, it will be us, only us, behind it all.’ He raised his bowl, and clinked it against Angved’s own. ‘The future,’ he repeated.
‘Our future,’ Angved agreed.
He sipped his brandy. Life was good.
Nineteen
She heard the footsteps. She was still awake past midnight, on this night of all nights. How had she known? There was no explaining it, but a premonition had needled her and jabbed her, and filled her stomach with sinking dread – a premonition that the end of her little world was coming.
She was Seda, youngest daughter of the Wasp Emperor, a child of eight years old.
The footsteps were in no hurry. There was shouting elsewhere in the palace, but the man, that death-handed man, idled down the corridor towards their door. She sat up in her bed. Distantly, someone was cursing. Distantly, there was weeping, fighting. Slave sounds usually, but somehow she knew that it was free men and women who now wept and fought, on this particular night.
She slipped out of her bed, shivering, her bare feet cold on the stone. It was always cold here, the sun’s fleeting warmth stolen away as quickly as it came, but there was a deeper cold now, and it came with those footsteps.
She knew who was approaching and what he intended. She knew what had happened: the terrible event that had hung in the balance for three days, and now was done.
Father? But he was dead, of course. His death had brought the footsteps.
Eight years old and intelligent enough to know what had occurred, and what must follow. For a moment she considered the window, but she had no Art to climb or fly with.
Stripped of any options, she hunched down at her own bedside, hearing the footsteps stop at the door of her room.
In the bed across from hers, her brother Tarvec stirred, but slept on.
She retreated and retreated, but the only place to go was beneath the bed. When she had been very young, she had believed, after a vivid nightmare, that a creature dwelt there – red-eyed and its mouthparts honed into a long, hollow stiletto – waiting for her to sleep so that it could drink her blood. Now the space beneath the bed became her refuge, for the monsters were already abroad.
The door opened. There had been guards posted outside. Perhaps they still stood there, but they made no attempt to hinder the footsteps coming into the room.
Tap, tap, tap. Army-issue boots approached the side of her bed, and she pictured him staring at the thrown- back blanket. She tried not to breathe, tried to summon up some of the hiding Art that some of the lesser kinden practised. Go away. There is nothing for you here.
Then he was crouching, and she could not but open her eyes and look into his face. It was not a bad face, in itself: a Wasp-kinden man with receding, greying hair. A soldier, like so many others. An officer. Her father’s friend.
But not today. She pressed herself back against the wall, as far from him as she could get, and jabbed an empty palm out towards him, as though she possessed the stinging Art that had made her people the greatest kinden in the world. She was only eight, though, and not so very precocious as all that. The intruder’s face merely twisted in dry humour.
She heard Tarvec stirring, sitting up, her brother asking, ‘Maxin, what-?’
Maxin’s face vanished from her view as he stood up, and she heard the sharp crackle of his sting, a truncated exclamation as Tarvec died.
Then Maxin was kneeling to peer at her again. Was he making a decision on his own, or recalling instructions given to him by that other brother, her eldest brother – the one about to assume the throne.
The Rekef officer stood up again and she heard his footsteps cross the room. She breathed a little easier, because now she remembered how the rest of the dream went. He would go and murder her other siblings, a second brother and two other sisters, so that, out of the Emperor Alvdan the First’s progeny, only the eldest boy and youngest girl would survive the night. Over the next tenday, eleven other Wasp-kinden – children or young men and women – would also die for the crime of having a mother whom the Emperor had found beguiling. Twenty-nine halfbreeds of various part-Wasp ancestries would follow them. Maxin was as thorough as the late Emperor had been lustful.
Then the third Emperor of the Wasps would take the throne, ushering in a new era.
She was so lost in this recollection that she almost failed to notice how the footsteps had not left the room. Maxin was standing at the doorway, and she knew he was looking back towards her.
A few hammering heartbeats before he moved again. He was coming back. But it hadn’t been like this. He had gone off about his bloody-handed business, she recalled. But now he had changed his mind? Not for General Maxin the restricting bonds of history. This time he would guarantee his new Emperor’s eternal reign by killing the only remaining threat to his power.
She was already screaming when he reached the bed, screaming as he dragged her out from under it, pushing her back towards the window with a hand about her throat. He was older now, with lines of cruelty and ambition written across his face which were the wages of eight years of service to the man he had made Emperor. He was just how she remembered him.
In the centre of the storm of terror wheeling about inside her head there remained one constant point, and she struggled for it like a swimmer in deep water. Just how I remember you? But if you will be that man, then let us renew our old acquaintance, Maxin.
With a great effort, she cast off her eight-year-old self enough to find the fabric of the dream around her and wrench at it, using strength without finesse. Give me visions, will you? Then I shall have some of my own.
The face of Maxin twisted and leered before her, and his grip was tight about her throat. With a fierce lunge of her will, she conjured hands on his shoulders, dragging him off her. In a moment she had squirmed from his grasp, watching the hated Rekef general hauled away by the two protectors that she had conjured from her own mind and pressed into service. Only one of them had been present for the real Maxin’s death, but it pleased her to have the two of them side by side: Thalric, her regent, and Brugan, her new Lord General of the Rekef.
For a moment she found herself fighting back and forth for control, sensing the dream world all around her try to suborn her new agents, to make the two newcomers a part of the same nightmare. But they were new, and reacting to the new was most definitely not the strong point of Khanaphes.
Thalric had arched General Maxin over with a knee in the small of the man’s back, thrusting his arms outwards so that Maxin could not sting. She saw Brugan’s knife glint just as it had when the real Maxin had met his end.
‘Hold,’ she commanded, because if this was to be her dream, she would rip all the joy she could from it. She approached the straining Maxin, with her palm held out, watching him physically diminish, from ogre to a wretched
