Empire in Black and Gold

Two decades ago the fashion in painting groups was to have them surprised in some domestic scene. So it was that the five figures here were in a taverna somewhere, turning to look at the viewer as though suddenly interrupted in some drinking discussion. The paint had scuffed, in places, flaked and chipped, but the picture was still clear. Tynisa stared.

Seated left of centre was a young Beetle who could have been Stenwold’s son, save that he had never had one. Still stocky, slightly round at the waist. She looked from that cheerful, smiling face to the solemn one the fire now danced on, trying to bridge the chasm time had made.

Standing behind his chair was Tisamon: there was no doubt of that. The artist had caught him perfectly, down to the hostile expression on his sharp features, a threat to the intruder. His right hand, almost out of sight behind Stenwold’s chair, wore the metal gauntlet of his folding claw. In the far left of the picture, a bald, knuckle- faced Fly leant back in his chair, a bowl of wine tilted in one hand, seemingly on the very point of overbalancing. Across from him was a darkly serious Ant-kinden man, his back turned three-quarters to the viewer, the links of his chain-mail hauberk picked out in minute detail.

In the centre of the picture, sitting on the table with her legs dangling, was a girl whose face Tynisa had herself watched grow from a child’s to a woman’s, in daily mirrored increments. At that point — in the frozen piece of time the artist had preserved — it was as though it was she herself amongst those strangers.

The picture was signed, ‘Nero’, in small strokes.

‘Tisamon — and me, of course,’ Stenwold said, seeing even as he said it that there was no ‘of course’ about his younger image. ‘That’s Nero himself, the one with the wine. He had a trick with mirrors, to paint his own image in. Nero lives still, usually trawling around the south, Merro, Egel and Seldis. The Ant is Marius. He. . died. And of course, that’s Atryssa. The most beautiful woman I ever knew.’ He found himself looking from the painted likeness to the living one. ‘I had thought that your father’s blood would show but, as you grew, year by year, you were more like her. No mother could give her child a greater gift.’

‘Except to stay with her,’ said Tynisa sadly. ‘Tell me the rest, Stenwold. I have to know.’

‘And we went our ways. Marius went back to Sarn and the army. I stayed at Collegium. Your mother and father made a living as duellists, out Merro way. I was early, perhaps even the first, to discover what was raising its head up east of the Lowlands. I followed my researches and they led me to the Empire. I called for my friends and they came, even though Marius had to leave his beloved city for me. We agreed to work against the Wasps. We saw some of their plans, and we knew that the Lowlands were just another point on the map for them, another place to conquer. You’ve heard of the city of Myna, and you know what happens next. It seemed destined to fall beneath the Empire’s boot, so we agreed to regroup there and see if the Wasps could be stopped before its gates. Nero dropped out — Fly-kinden always know the best time to make an exit. The rest of us. . When we met, Atryssa wasn’t there. And then we were betrayed. The defenders of Myna were betrayed. It seemed that only one of us could have done it. And Atryssa wasn’t there. It broke Tisamon, or nearly. Because he had loved her, in spite of everything he believed about her people.’

For a moment Stenwold could not go on. The sound of a city dying was still in his mind. He remembered the citizens of Myna out in the streets, Wasp soldiers coursing overhead, the breaking of the gates: the bitter taste of failure and betrayal. He remembered the desperate fight on the airfield. Marius’s soldiers retreating, shields held high. Marius calling. Marius, dying in the orthopter. The grief and rage and loss that had become Tisamon’s whole world.

‘Marius died as we fled Myna, and if I hadn’t stopped him, Tisamon would have got himself killed as well.’

‘But she didn’t betray you?’

‘To this day I do not know who did, save that, after all this time, I know it was none of my friends,’ Stenwold replied. ‘But it was too late, then. Too late for Marius. Too late for Atryssa. Too late for all of us.’ The end of his golden days. The shadows gathering. Tisamon was right: Stenwold had become what he had despised. He had gone on to set himself against an Empire, and he had made his students his pawns, and some of them had suffered, and some of them had died.

‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Tynisa asked him. ‘Knowing this, with him? Help me, I feel like I’m losing my world.’

He reached out and she took his hand gratefully. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what am I? I thought I was yours, and now I’m just some. . mistake? Some cast-off?’

‘No!’ he said quickly. ‘Tynisa, listen to me. Don’t ever think that you were not meant. She told me, close to the end. She told me of her last night with Tisamon, before we split up. Before Myna. She had her precautions, like any woman in her position, but that last night — she felt it might really be their last night. She let it happen. She loved him, and she wanted to bear his child.’

When she folded herself into his arms, he held her and wondered if it would feel different if she had genuinely been his daughter.

‘And what now?’ she whispered.

‘He will not come to you,’ he told her, ‘because he does not know how. But that still means you can go to him when you are ready.’ And in response to her half-heard correction, ‘Yes, if. If you are ready.’

He had expected some burden to lift from him at this point, but the crushing weight of his responsibilities piled higher on him, and he knew he would never be free of them.

His place was always away from the fire. Moth-kinden were born and raised in cold places, and he did not need its light. Achaeos’s eyes, the blank white eyes of all of his people, knew neither night nor darkness.

The others were still arguing, the fat Beetle and his Spider girl. Achaeos had not even tried to follow their conversation. It was clearly some tawdry domestic business that had sprung up between them and the Mantis, and it was therefore beneath his notice. The other one, the loathsome machine-fumbler, would be either asleep or worshipping the stinking, groaning monster they were forcing him to ride in. Achaeos shuddered at the thought. The motion of it made him feel ill, the sight of its moving parts turned his stomach.

After the distraction of their bickering gave way to a need for sleep he reached for his bones and crouched down to cast them, as was the old habit. What did it matter what they said, when his destiny was out of his hands already? They had looked at him as though he was unsound, the Arcanum back in Helleron. He was drifting from them, from what they expected of him.

The bones fell amongst patchy grass. He grimaced and poked about, moving the blades aside to try to determine what pattern they made, but it had no sense to it. It seemed to be promising absurdly catastrophic things, far beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or even ‘life’ or ‘death’. He decided that the uneven ground had fouled the divination and gathered them up again. With care he cleared a decent patch of ground, plucking the grass away, rubbing the ground flat. He was going to far too much effort now, just to satisfy his habit, but it had become a point of pride. He took a breath and cast the bones again.

For a long time he remained very still, studying them. It was a pattern he had never seen before, outside the books — the old books, that was. If he had not researched his pastime so keenly, he might never have recognized what the world was telling him.

They gave one word to it, in those old books, and that word was ‘Corruption.’ To the Moths it had its own meaning, as everything did. It did not mean the bribery and material greed of the Beetle-kinden. It meant the rotting of the soul, the very worst of the old dark magics.

He shook himself. He was a poor seer, no great magician he. He was in no position to make these dire predictions. I have misread the sign, or miscast the bones. He reached for them again, to gather them up, and drew his hand back with a startled hiss. They had burned when he touched them and, as he watched, they were blackening, pitting. The scent of decay came to him, and he finally knew what they had been trying to say.

He almost fell into the fire, he was so desperate to reach Stenwold Maker. The man was asleep, but Achaeos did not care. He took hold of a heavy shoulder and shook it, and heard a whisper as Stenwold began groping immediately for his sword.

‘What. . What is it? What?’ he muttered. ‘Are we under attack?’

‘I have to speak to you, now,’ Achaeos almost spat at him.

‘What?’ Stenwold paused and then stared at him. ‘I know it doesn’t bother your people, but it’s the middle of the night.’ He looked haggard, ten years older.