Empire in Black and Gold

The Fly-kinden messenger took the sealed scroll from him and bowed minutely. A moment later she was at the window, and then gone: a flurry of briefly glimpsed wings and a small figure receding in the sky.

Salma took a deep breath. The moment the letter had left his hands, he had cast himself off on a journey of no return. At least his would not be a lonely one; the thought quirked his lips into a smile. He determined that he would now indulge in one of his favourite pastimes, and go and annoy Tynisa.

She knew from the boldness and the pattern to his knock that it was Salma, come to call on her because he was bored. Tynisa paused before her glass, debating whether to play dead or to call out to him. It was a shame, she thought, that he usually did seek her out from ennui. She kept a fair number of young men at any given time who would seek her out with gifts, with flowers or some trinket of jewellery, a good poem stolen or a bad one written. Salma sought her out merely because her company amused him, and that was not the same thing after all.

But it was why he interested her so much, she realized. It was because he was proof against all her looks and smiles and subtle words. And he was a prince. There were tacticians’ sons aplenty in Collegium, and the heirs of industrialists, lords of commerce or of learning or strategy. None of them was a prince, though. The Lowlands did not possess any with that kind of cachet.

She was wearing her favourite silks, that swept down from her throat and left her shoulders bare: clothes suitable for a lady’s private chamber. So many men would have given so much, she thought proudly, for the privilege of seeing her thus adorned, but Salma would just come in and throw himself straight on the couch, and not really care all that much about her looks.

‘Oh come in then, if you have to,’ she said, trying to sound annoyed by the intrusion. She supposed that she should at least be glad that it was always her he sought to alleviate his routine, but the thought didn’t help that much. It was not that he did not have an eye for girls. He had his choice, almost, of the female students, and choose he did. Towards her, though, he was. . different.

He sauntered in, pausing in the doorway to pass his robe to Stenwold’s long-suffering servant. ‘Well now, a work of art half-done,’ he commented, leaning against the doorframe. ‘Don’t let me stop you. I’m always one for watching an artist at work.’

She gave a wry smile and turned her face towards him, seeing just the barest start of surprise break his poise.

‘Careless,’ he said. ‘How did that happen?’

She touched the bruise which extended from cheekbone to chin on the left side of her face. ‘You’re the clever foreigner who knows all our ways inside out, Salma, so you tell me.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You didn’t.’

‘Didn’t I? Then how else did I get it, your royal principalness?’ She turned back to the glass. It was a Spider-made artefact. All the best ones were. It was not that the Spiderlands craftsmen had superior skill, more that they knew what to look for. Being so fond of their own image, as I am.

‘Piraeus.’ Salma stepped into the room at last, casting himself down on the couch.

‘I told you what I wanted with him,’ she confirmed. There was a whole alchemy of make-up spread out before her, Spider-harvested and prepared, all of it. She made several delicate passes across her face, first with one brush and then another.

‘And?’

‘And I told him I wanted to fight him, a duel, and he laughed at me. He looked at me down his nose, like the Mantids always do. I was beneath his notice, for I was a Spider. I was a thing of contempt, not fit to draw blade against.’

‘He said all that?’

‘Oh, posing, posing. You know how it is. I was talking too, though. When he finished speaking he had no more to say. When I finished he had agreed to meet me at the Forum.’

‘And that must have gone well,’ Salma noted dryly. She looked straight at him, over her shoulder.

‘He beat me. He beat me by two strikes to none,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve another bruise on my side that’s a little short of this one for size, but lovely for colour, like a flower bouquet. You can see it if, you want?’ She tilted her head, mockingly coquettish.

He shrugged indifferently, one hand tracing patterns on the wall. ‘I’m no chirurgeon,’ he said with a blithe smile, ‘but if you want. So what, then? Or did you really think you could beat him?’

‘I wanted to see if I could make him fight, Salma. That was the object. This. .’ she passed another brush over the bruise. ‘This is a medal for the sort of wars I’ll be fighting in.’

‘Spider wars.’

‘Your people don’t play that game, Salma?’

She had him there, and he laughed. ‘Well, perhaps, but nobody plays as well as the Spider-kinden. Even one, it seems, brought up by Beetles. It must be in the blood.’

‘In the blood and in the Art,’ she agreed. ‘And I needed to know. Now that Stenwold’s come clean with me, with us, I needed to be sure of myself.’

‘For a woman with a bruise the size of Lake Sideriti you certainly sound sure of yourself.’

She turned from her paints and powders again, a face now unmarked, devoid of blemish. ‘What bruise?’ she asked sweetly. ‘And besides, I’ll have him again sometime, and that time I’ll win. It’s not just the Mantids who remember a grudge.’

Cheerwell Maker, Che, was meditating. There was a room for that in any decent-sized house in Collegium, while in the poorer areas of the city there were civic buildings set aside just for this silent communion. If she had gone into the Ant city of Vek, miles down the coast, she would have found great echoing halls filled with men and women, and especially the young, each seeking to communicate with the infinite. In the Mantis holds of Etheryon and Nethyon, deep amidst the trees, there were glades and groves where no sword was ever drawn, where only the mind was unsheathed.

This was not about gods. Well read, she knew the concept. Even in the Bad Old Days before the revolution, this had not been about gods. Long ago, when her people had been no more than gullible slaves to charlatan wizards, there had been no idols or altars. The imaginary spirits and forces that the Moth-kinden rulers had believed in were invoked and commanded and harnessed: religion but not worship.

Meditation was different to that old quackery. Nobody doubted how important it was. The tactile evidence was all around them. Meditation was the Ancestor Art, the founding basis of all the insect-kinden. Whether it was meditation to make the Fly-kinden fly, and the Ants live within each other’s minds; to make the Mantids swift, the Spiders subtle, meditation was the Art that lived within them all, waiting to be unlocked.

Cheerwell Maker was very bad at it. It was not that she was slow, for being slow would probably have helped. She had a quick mind, and it chafed too easily at inaction. No sooner had she approached some contemplative plateau than it buzzed off after some other trail and instead left her uncomfortably aware of her surroundings. Such as now.

The duelling match hadn’t helped. It might even haunt her for the rest of her days. When she closed her eyes, trying to find tranquillity, what she saw instead was the inside of the Prowess Forum. Falger again was standing across from her, sword gripped too tight in one hand. He was a gormless-looking youth, Falger, and none too fit. She had realized that she really should be able to beat him.

All eyes had been upon her, and she had hated that. It was Tynisa, not her, who basked in the public regard. Che had felt herself becoming flustered, though. It was not the spectators: it was her comrades behind her, their eyes drilling her back full of holes. Most of all it was Uncle Stenwold, because she so wanted to prove to him that she could actually do this.

But meditation? She recaptured her train of thought and placed it under close arrest. This was not something that should be a challenge to her. Most children started this at eight or ten and took to it without trouble. All over the world Beetle-kinden men and women, and all the other races of mankind, sat cross-legged as she was now and opened themselves up to their ideal. Primitive peoples might have gods, and the Bad Old Days had their totem spirits, but sensible Beetle thinkers had conjectured the Ideal Form. All ideas, they said, possessed a most perfect theoretical expression, and what she bent her mind towards was the Ideal Beetle. Her people, all of them, across the Lowlands and beyond, had imagined and explored and refined the Ideal, drawn strength from it, for thousands of years, since long before the first word of history was written.

Now all she had to do was to prise open her mind sufficiently to allow the enveloping perfection of that Ideal