Empire in Black and Gold

to me. I am not good with words, as you can tell. So I found her a gift.’ One hand made a movement towards his rolled blankets and his pack, but he withdrew it. ‘And then she did not come. But I could not cast the gift away. It was. . important, valuable, to me. I have carried it ever since, wherever I went. I have put it above my bed and hoped that some rogue would steal it, and rid me of it, for it has always reminded me of her. And every night, when I came back to whatever low place I lodged in, there it still was. And now you are here, in this city, her daughter and her very image — and my own blood as well. And you have lost a sword.’

At last he looked her straight in the eye. ‘You don’t believe in fate,’ he stated.

‘I do not.’

‘You have a heritage. In truth you have two. You have been brought up by Beetles, surrounded by machines and ideas you cannot ever grasp. You try to think like them, but your blood says otherwise. My people believe in fate, and in many other things the Beetle-kinden do not teach, and your mother’s kinden likewise. I believe this is fate.’

And he lifted from behind him a rapier such as she had never seen. It was scabbarded in iridescent green that shifted and changed as the light touched it, bound with what she thought at first was brass, but then saw must be antique gold. It was shorter than her old blade, but when he put it into her ready hands she found it was heavier. The guard was crafted into interlocking shapes that might represent leaves or elytra, all in gold and dark steel and enamelled green. Her eyes seemed unable to stay still on it without turning to follow its twining lines.

She had taken it by the scabbard, which seemed to be finely worked chitin shell, and now she reached for the hilt but Tisamon stopped her.

‘There are formalities,’ he told her. His hand touched the sword’s tapered pommel, which ended in a curved claw. In an instant he had pressed his palm to it, drawing a raw red line beside the ball of his thumb. She saw a drop of his blood glisten on the gilt metal.

‘Now you,’ he said. She opened her mouth to protest and he told her, ‘This is important. I do not ask you to believe, only to believe that I believe.’

She gripped the scabbard just below its neck and stabbed the same metal thorn into her hand. It felt like the sting of a small insect just before the poison starts, a tingling pain. His blood, and my blood, both on my hands.

‘Now draw the sword,’ he directed, and she did.

When her hand closed about the textured wood of the grip something went through her, a shock as though she had just been stabbed. Her heart lurched and for a second she felt the sword in her hands as a living thing, newly awoken. The feeling passed almost at once but her sense of wonder returned in force as she slid the blade from the scabbard.

It was shorter than she was used to, as she had guessed from the sheath, and it did not seem to be of steel at all, but a dark metal lustreless as lead. It was thicker, too, than she had thought, tapering only in its last few inches. In her hands it was like an unfamiliar animal that might yet get to know her scent and be trained.

‘This is. . old,’ she said slowly.

‘There are perhaps six or seven amongst my people who still have the secret of making such blades, but this one dates back to the Age of Lore, as all the best ones do.’

‘The when?’ It was a term she had not heard in Collegium.

‘Before the Apt revolution,’ Tisamon informed her.

‘But that’s. . not possible.’ She looked at the weapon in her hands, gleaming only a little in the dawn light. ‘That was over five hundred years ago.’

‘And the forging itself occurred another hundred before that,’ he said. ‘Forged in an age before doubt. Forged in blood and belief and the purity of skill — all the things that make up my kinden. It is mine to hold and give because, though I prefer the claw, I have completed my mastership of this blade, which is the blade of your blood from mother and father both. I have undergone the rituals, stood before the judges of Parosyal and shed my blood there. One day, if you consent, I will take you there too.’

It took her a moment to realize what he was saying. The Island Parosyal was some kind of spiritual place for the Mantis-kinden, or so she had been taught. He did not mean some mere religion. He was speaking of the Weaponsmasters, the badge he wore, the ancient order so jealously guarded.

‘They would never accept me,’ she said. ‘I am a halfbreed.’

‘If I vouch for you, if I train you, and if you are sufficiently skilled, then there will be no human voice with the right to deny you,’ he told her. ‘It is your choice, Tynisa. I am a poor father to you. I have no lands, no estate, no legacy from four and a half decades, save my trade. So it is all that I can give you.’

And before she could cloud her mind with ‘but’s and ‘what if’s she said, ‘Yes.’

A silence fell almost the moment that Kymene entered the room. Even Stenwold, part-way through puzzling over the charts and accounts that Tynisa had given him, paused instinctively, looking up. He caught his breath despite himself.

He had seen her last night, of course, looking weary and dirty from the sewers. bruised from her captivity. More like a thin and underfed waif than the Maid of Myna.

She had used her time well since, and he had no idea if she had even slept, for now she presented herself to her faithful in the way they wished to see her.

She wore full armour, or a version of it. A conical helm and coif framing her delicate, unyielding features. A breastplate, a man’s breastplate, painted black with two arrows on it in red. One pointed towards the ground, the other towards the sky, and Stenwold read that as We have fallen. We shall rise again. She wore a kilt of studded leather tooled with silver, high greaves patterned after the breastplate, and gauntlets the same. She wore no shirt, no breeches, though, as an ordinary soldier might. Her arms and legs showed bare skin of blue-grey to remind them that she was no mere spear carrier but the Maid of Myna. Her black cloak billowed behind her as she entered.

There was no cheer as she arrived, and Stenwold bitterly thought she deserved one until he realized what attention such noise might call down on them. Instead the cheer was in their eyes, in their faces.

‘Chyses,’ she began, and the man came forward almost nervously. ‘You are the one who gave me hope in the dark. I shall always remember you for it. You are dear to me, from now.’

She clasped him by the arm and Stenwold guessed that their history had not been so amicable in the past, and it was to erase that stain that he had mounted the rescue. Chyses made to return to his place, and Stenwold saw tears glint in his eyes, but then Kymene was catching at his sleeve, keeping him at her side.

‘You have come here from all across the city,’ she told her audience. ‘I know most of you. I know that you are not all friends with one another, that each of you holds a revolution in your hearts that differs from your neighbour’s. You are all come here under one roof, though, when before my capture I could not bring you together. Let us thank the Wasps for that, at least.’

A slight current of laughter, while Stenwold glanced from face to face. Old and young, men and women, Soldier Beetles of Myna and a few others, Grasshopper militia, Fly-kinden gangsters sympathetic to the cause, even a couple of ruddy-skinned Ant renegades from the conquered city of Maynes. All of them now watched Kymene and waited for her orders.

‘You must probably expect me to set the city alight with a single brand, to call on every man, woman and child of Myna to rise up with staves and swords to drive the Empire from us.’

A few cries to the positive, but her tone had caught their attention, and they waited.

‘You know that the Bloat is dead!’ she called, to emphatic nods and savage grins. ‘But who killed him?’ she demanded of them, and that struck them dumb.

‘I did not slay him, not that I would have stayed my hand. Neither did Chyses, nor any of our party. Yet we all know he is dead. So who slew the Bloat?’ Her eyes fixed each in turn until one spoke.

‘They say he crossed another Wasp over a woman, is what I’ve heard. I heard they executed some officer for it.’

‘It was Captain Rauth, I heard,’ another put in. ‘The Bloat’s sneak. We won’t miss him either.’

‘Is that what they say?’ Kymene asked, killing the murmur of speculation that was beginning. ‘The Wasps have been fighting each other? Even as Chyses was breaking the lock of my cell, they were killing one another in the dark? Myna will have a new governor, worse no doubt than the old, and look to that man for why the Bloat was killed. For now they have put the word out that the Bloat is dead, made it very public indeed. Why is that, though? Why trumpet the news from end to end of the city, so that we all know it and can take heart from it?’