Empire in Black and Gold

‘It’s light.’

‘Che, it’s dark.’

She goggled at him. She could see him so clearly. She could see Grief clearly, and also the bare walls of their prison. The light was strange, though. It was like strong moonlight, leached of colour. Even Grief’s ever-changing skin and hair were just a motley of greys to her.

Salma pointed upwards. Lining two walls were a row of slits, and when she had bedded down for the night there had been a faint light there still, as the dusk passed into darkness.

The light was not coming from there, for they were no brighter than the rest of the room. The strange light was not coming from anywhere.

‘Salma,’ she said slowly. ‘I think I’ve found the Art — the Ancestor Art. Or else it’s found me. Salma, how did you first know that you could. .?’

‘I could jump into the air and stay there,’ he said blandly, but she was too excited to care about his sarcasm, because she could see clearly and it was still night. This was a Beetle Art, she knew, though not a common one, and why should it not finally manifest in this closed box of a place?

And yet there were others who could see in the dark from their very births, needing no Art for it, who were truly creatures of darkness and the night. She had met one recently and his blood had been on her hands.

Night brother, the Butterfly had said, and she had dreamt the voice of Achaeos, remembered somehow from that strange, brief encounter.

She leant back against the wall and discovered that there was a patina of frost slowly melting across it. Yet the night outside had been overcast, not chill at all.

They crept back towards the camp before dawn, Tisamon padding silently in front, and Tynisa trailing behind. For her it had been an unreal night. Tisamon was a hard man to keep up with, and yet she had shadowed him all the way to Asta. Together they had passed through the ring of sentries, dodging the great lamp, the beam of which passed sometimes across the temporary streets of the muster town. All the while there had been not one word spoken between them. Tisamon had, at first, barely seemed to know that she was there, but as the night had progressed, something had grown between them, some wordless commonality. His stealthy poise and tread had slowly changed to include her in his progress. Where he had once looked both ways, silent in the shadows of a storehouse or barracks, now he would look left while she looked right. He had eased into a trust of her, a confidence that she was up to the task, and all still without ever acknowledging her. Then had come the slave pits, and he had stepped back and kept watch while she, who knew the pair, had sought out Che and Salma.

The two hunters had developed an understanding, it seemed, and, as they had come back through the forest fringe, perhaps more than that. The darkness within the forest was as dense as midnight, not the near-dawn they had left outside, but she could still see enough in the half-light to make out the trees.

And more than the trees. She stopped suddenly, and Tisamon halted at the same instant, looking straight at her.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you see them too, don’t you?’

She was not sure whether she really had until he said it, but there were figures there, amid the trees. Not close, not moving, and in the gloom even her eyes fought to distinguish their outlines. Then they became clearer, or perhaps closer, and she stopped trying to make them out. They were human, or might have been. They had the poise and stance of Mantis-kinden and yet, as she had glimpsed them, they seemed to be formed like praying mantids, with gleaming chitin and glittering eyes, and yet again there was gnarled wood and thorns worked into them.

Tynisa stopped then and turned her eyes away. ‘I do not. . I cannot be seeing this.’ A Collegium-raised girl, from a world of rationality and science, for all that she understood none of it.

‘Your blood says otherwise,’ was Tisamon’s quiet reply, before they moved on in silence once more.

It took a while of tracking to locate Stenwold’s new campsite. When they stepped into sight the Beetle looked up at them and she saw the brief hope dashed in his face.

‘Any sign?’ he asked quietly.

Tisamon shook his head and went to sit by the dying fire.

‘They keep their prisoners in pits there, and we looked in every one,’ Tynisa explained. ‘No sign. They could have been in one of the buildings. There was no way of knowing.’

She went to sit next to Tisamon, but he looked up at her with a face utterly devoid of invitation, only his usual cold mask with which he confronted the world, the face of a man expecting a fight. Their shared silent communion of the night was gone, and in his eyes there was no admission that it had ever existed. Mere minutes before they had been moving as one between the trees. Now his eyes were unwriting it all, remaking each memory in his own image. She felt a bitter anger well up in her.

What was all that about, then? What did we share earlier, and where did we leave it? But she could voice no questions, and he would give no answers. Her fists clenched and unclenched and, not for the first time, she wished that she could talk to Che right now. Che was the only person she could unburden herself to.

All the more reason to rescue her.

She rose and went to sit beside Stenwold instead.

‘Why did you move the camp?’ Tisamon asked. ‘Not that it was difficult to find.’

‘We had some nocturnal visitors.’ Stenwold shook his head heavily. ‘A patrol chased us into the woods.’ He saw Tisamon flinch and he frowned. ‘They’re just woods, Tisamon. Trees. You get them all over.’

‘Are they indeed?’ The Mantis regarded him. ‘And so you two just crept into the Darakyon and crept out again?’

Stenwold shared an unhappy glance with Totho. ‘Well. . you can imagine me and the boy here at night in the middle of a forest. .’ A quick look at Tisamon showed the Mantis was not satisfied with that. ‘What can I say?’

‘I don’t know. What can you say?’

‘It was dark. There were sounds. Woods at night are. . not my favourite place,’ Stenwold said defensively. There were sounds. Oh there were sounds all right. He wondered if the last dregs of the panic showed again on his face, in that moment: he and Totho blundering in circles, trying to retrace their path. There had been no path. Behind them had been only briars, until they had found a pitch-black clearing by feeling with their hands, a clearing from which there was no way out at all. They had gone from tree to gnarled tree, lancing their gloves on thorns, leaving drops of their blood smeared on the bark, and they had gone around and around in the darkness until Totho had tried to light a lantern, and to the pits with the Wasps. Stenwold remembered that moment most of all, for the steel lighter would not catch, just sparks and sparks that illuminated nothing but themselves, and in the silence afterwards they had heard an almost musical sound, from all around and far away, that could have been the forest breathing.

‘We had. . all sorts of games running through the woods at night,’ Stenwold finished weakly, and heard Tisamon’s almost triumphant snort.

‘Where is the Moth?’ the Mantis asked.

‘Achaeos?’ Stenwold looked at his hands. ‘He wasn’t with us. I can’t imagine the Wasps caught him. He can fly and see in the dark, after all. Still, if he’s around, he’s still keeping his distance. He never did want to go into the forest.’

Stenwold and Totho had sat down to wait for dawn, while the Darakyon creaked and rasped about them, lightless and bitterly cold. The time they had spent there, unable to sleep, nerves constantly fraying at each groan and snap, had seemed too long to possibly fit inside only one night.

Then it had come to them. They had heard it, the slow, careful approach of something very large. There had been the rattle of Totho trying to load his crossbow blind, and Stenwold had taken up his sword, hopeless in the darkness. I do not believe in Tisamon’s folk tales, he had told himself, but traitor logic had grinned at him and said, Why think of ghosts at all? There are many things belonging to the material world that can kill a man. In his mind’s eye he had envisaged that stealthy approach as a mantis, an insect ten feet long with huge night-seeing eyes and neatly folded killing arms. He had held out his sword invisibly before him, hearing Totho’s fumbling grow increasingly desperate and hearing the thing, whatever it was, grow closer.

They had run, the pair of them. In the same moment, as if by agreement, they had bolted, and the clearing was suddenly permeable again. They had bolted through briars and needling thorns and not stopped, and they had