Empire in Black and Gold

daggers. From the brief glimpse she had, they looked like guards, city watch.

But of course, she realized, as the shadow of a great wall fell across her, it would be considered menial for Wasps to police their subjects, unless there is some great need for it. These strange sentries must be drafted in from some other imperial conquest.

And then she looked up at the edifice that loomed above them, and she choked, because it was ugly beyond belief. All around it the buildings of Myna conformed to a low and careful style, flat-roofed and spartan like Ant-city designs. This thing was so utterly alien here that it must have been Wasp architecture: a great tiered monstrosity that looked so out of place it might have been dropped from the sky. There was a broad flight of steps at the fore that narrowed upwards to a door that, even as they approached, still looked tastelessly oversized. They could have driven a fair-sized automotive through it, if they could only have got it up the steps. The door was flanked by two statues, which matched neither each other, the building nor the city. One of them was something abstract, the work of some madman or genius who had made the stone flow like water under his hands. The other showed a warrior in strange armour, and Salma missed a step when he saw it and almost fell backwards. From that reaction Che realized it must be from his own people, war loot from the recent campaign.

Brief glimpses of the interior, where shafts of sunlight fell like spears, and there was a gallery hall like a museum that valued its exhibits by the amount of gilt they sported rather than their meaning, and then they were descending underground again. Grief was taken off one way by Aagen, with a final backwards glance at Salma, then Che’s chin was seized, her head tilted painfully back to look up into Thalric’s face.

‘I have business,’ the Wasp told her, ‘and when I am done we have a conversation to finish, so think on it.’

She was still thinking on it when the cell door closed behind her.

On the other side, the free side, of her cell door, Thalric took a moment to consider his options. The Rekef Inlander had sent him to Myna to have a word with his old friend Ulther. Myna was one of the cities supplying the war against the Lowlands, the war that Thalric had been preparing for a long time, and apparently it was not pulling its weight. Was it really due to Ulther being greedy and corrupt? It only mattered that the Rekef thought it so. They did not trust Ulther, which meant that neither should Thalric.

On their way to the governor’s palace he had been carefully watching the crowd. Still, he had nearly missed it, for Fly-kinden got everywhere, after all. That was why the Rekef made use of them. Because he had been watching, he had seen te Berro, watching him in return. The Rekef had sent Thalric, but they did not trust him either. There was clearly a choice coming up in the near future which he was loath to make.

Thalric liked life simple, which many would think was a strange attitude for a spymaster. The simplicity he craved was to know exactly what side he was on. This was why he had thrown himself into the Rekef Outlander so diligently. The Empire was right and the quarrelsome, disorganized and barbaric foreigners were wrong. Once you had that simple truth in your head, so many problems just melted away.

But the problems had just been waiting for their moment, he now saw.

Ulther and he, they went way back. Thalric had been aged fifteen at Myna, the most junior of junior officers. They had given him a squad of ten men and put him near the front when the gates fell. He had acquitted himself adequately.

There had been a colonel commanding the assault. At this remove Thalric found he couldn’t remember the man’s name. He had died, anyway. The Soldier Beetle-kinden of Myna hadn’t done it. Some roving assassin with an anti-Empire brief had played that role. Rumour suggested it had been a Commonweal plot. Whatever the reason, Major Ulther had taken charge of the street-to-street fighting. The Mynans weren’t as tricky as Ant-kinden, no mindlinks here to coordinate perfect attacks and defences, but every one of the bastards had been out fighting, even the children. It had been dealt with in the usual way — cause enough destruction and hold a knife to the leaders’ throats. Ulther had caused the destruction and held the knife, and in Thalric’s view he had done it brilliantly, so Myna had been taken in half the time, with half the loss of life.

And then of course the street-to-street patrols, rooting out the resistance and hunting down the ringleaders, had been the very action to test the young Thalric, so that by the time the city was firmly in Empire hands he had been made a full lieutenant and the envy of his peers. Ulther had then taken him into his confidence, his inner circle, so Thalric had learned a great deal about the Empire and how it worked.

Ulther had put forward his name to the Rekef, or so he always believed. The irony was not lost on Thalric. He could cling to the hope, he supposed, that the rumours were misplaced and that Ulther remained a pillar of imperial loyalty, but what were the chances of that?

A chill went through him. Even if Ulther had not put a foot wrong in seventeen years, if Thalric went back to the Rekef with that report what would they do? What would they think of him? Would they have sent him at all if they had not wanted a foregone conclusion? Who exactly was under the lens here, anyway?

Too many questions and too little solid ground. He went in search of Aagen and found him supervising the loading of his flier.

‘Lieutenant Aagen.’

Aagen threw him a preoccupied salute, while leafing through a manifest.

‘Lieutenant, I want you to arrange for another pilot to take this machine back to Asta.’

‘Thalric?’ Aagen turned quickly enough at that. ‘I mean, sir?’

‘I’m going to require your services here. Consider yourself deputized, Aagen,’ Thalric continued.

‘But-’

Thalric put a hand on his shoulder, guiding him to one side. ‘Listen, Aagen, I’ve known you for a long time. .’

‘Yes?’

‘I need someone here I can trust.’

Aagen glanced over his shoulder at the local soldiers supervising the loading. ‘But the governor-’

‘Not the governor or his men, understand?’

The artificer’s face fell. ‘Oh spit, like that, is it? Listen, I’m Engineering Corps. I’m not one of your sneaks.’

Thalric smiled. ‘Who knows, Lieutenant, maybe you’ll be promoted. By the way, you’ve done some interrogation work, haven’t you, as an artificer?’

Aagen nodded, though his expression showed he was not happy about admitting it.

‘You might want to revise your notes then,’ Thalric said grimly. ‘I may require your services.’

They were glad of the automotive in the end, with the exception of Achaeos, who would have happily abandoned it. The roads had become impossible for between Myna and Asta there was a constant traffic of black and gold. However the stilt-legged machine that Scuto had found for them was more than capable of making its stuttering way cross-country, with Totho and Stenwold winding the clockwork twice a day.

Are we inside the Empire now? When did we cross the border? But it was a false premise, of course. Stenwold knew that maps took boundaries that shifted like water and tried to set them in stone. The borders were where the Empire wished them to be, unless somebody took a sufficient stand.

And will they finally take a stand? When I go to the Assembly and tell them that the little stopover of Asta is now a nest of soldiers? Or will they just shut their ears again and throw me out?

The land lying east of the Darakyon was rugged, home to a few families of goat herders or beetle drovers. Off the road itself there was no imperial stamp to be seen. What could they do to further oppress this poverty? On one occasion, Stenwold and the others shared a fire with some of the locals: quiet, sullen men with blue-grey Mynan skin. There were many halfbreeds amongst them, mixing blood of Beetle-kinden or of Wasp. They seemed inheritors of an unhappiness that no shifting of political boundaries would change, but they asked no questions and they had fresh meat. This made them more than tolerable fireside companions.

When the imperial patrol did at last find them, they were prepared. Tisamon, Tynisa and the Moth had melted away, ready with sword and claw if matters turned difficult. Stenwold and Totho had meanwhile waited patiently as a half-dozen of the Light Airborne fell to earth around them.

This was when Stenwold had been sure that they were now inside the Empire. If they had been beyond its borders then there would have been blood, and in the confusion of ambush it would have been blood on both sides, likely as not, but clearly these men were bored, sent out from some convoy just to make work for them in