us tramping down the coast, they’ll wipe us out.’
Nero nodded. ‘I can see your point there. All right, Parops. I’ve been a good friend to you — or as good as I could be, yes?’
‘For a Fly-kinden, I suppose.’
‘High praise there. Right then, I’m going to suggest two courses of action, and you’ll not like either of them. All right? One of them is what I’m about to do, and the other one’s what you could do. You don’t have to, but I’m out of ideas if you don’t. First off, I’m going back.’
Parops stared at him. ‘You’re mad.’
‘It’s a loyalty thing, Parops.
‘His two agents, or apprentices — the halfbreed and the other one?’
‘The Commonwealer, yes. I have to find out what happened to them. Probably they’re dead, but I have to know. Because Stenwold would want to know.’
‘They’ll catch you,’ Parops said. ‘You’ll end up a slave, or dead.’
‘They won’t catch me,’ Nero said, ‘because I’m not going skulking in like a thief. I’m just going to walk straight up to them: Nero the famous artist, perhaps you’ve heard of me? Happened to have a lot of black and yellow paint spare. Maybe you want a portrait. You know the stuff.’
‘They will kill you or enslave you,’ Parops said firmly.
‘You were going to kill me too, at one stage. I’m good at not being killed. I’ve done it all my life,’ Nero said. ‘I owe Stenwold, and he would want to know.’
Parops shook his head but found he did not have the strength to argue. ‘So what is your suggestion for us? Is it as mad as that one?’
‘Madder,’ Nero said, giving the first smile anyone there had seen for a long time. In a low voice he explained his plan, and men around them began raising their heads as Parops’s mind put out the information.
‘We cannot do that. It would be-’
‘Suicide?’
‘Worse. We’d be slaves. My people would never agree to it,’ Parops stated.
‘Wouldn’t they? There’s an Empire coming this way, with armies to spare, and you’ve got seven-hundred-odd highly trained Ant warriors. So who would turn you away?’
Parops just stared at him.
‘Will you at least think about it?’ Nero pressed.
There was a moment when Parops did not even see him, when he was concentrating simply on the interchange of ideas flashing between his men, their rapid, silent debate of the concept, of Nero’s plan.
‘We will attempt it,’ said Parops finally. ‘What do we have to lose?’
Twenty-Three
He swam in those dark reaches, those vast abyssal reaches that no light had ever touched. No stars there were, and no lamps. There was only the void and the rushing of the wind, or the sucking of the current that sought to draw him downwards.
He had fought free of those depths once already, and now he had no strength for any second struggle. There were monsters in those depths, trawling for ever through the vacant dark with their jaws agape. To fall between the needles of their teeth meant oblivion and surrender.
Not death, because all was death here.
In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor’s bag but more often an artificer’s toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines.
Amongst his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur — too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.
Amongst his own people they drew up short poems for a death, and carved its wings into the sides of tombs and cenotaphs, with head down and abdomen tapering towards the sky as it stooped towards its prey. They would paint death’s likeness as a shadow in the background, always in the upper right quarter of the scroll, when depicting some hero’s or great man’s last hours. In plays an actor, clad all in grey, would take the stage bearing a black- lacquered likeness of the insect, which he would make swoop or hover until the time came for it to alight.
He himself could not fly, for his wings would not spark to life. The void hung heavy on him and it clawed at him, howling for him. He swam and struggled and fought, because a second’s stillness would see him whisked back to the monsters and the pit. He fought, but knew not why he fought. He had no memories, no thoughts, nothing but this haggard, desperate fight.
And there seemed, for the faintest moment, something hard and distant there in the void, some great presence diminished almost to a star-speck by its separation from him: an insect, but not the death insect. Four glittering wings and eyes that saw everything, all at once: the source of his Art and his tribe; the archetype of his people. He was a spirit lost and that creature was his destination — where he would rejoin the past and be with his ancestors.
And he struck out for it, knowing only that it was right to do so. But it was so far and the void still dragged at him, and that tiny gnat-speck of light was receding and receding.
And then gone.
And with that spark dead, he finally gave up. The fight left him and he swam no more but let the wind catch him and draw him down into darkness.
But there was a light again. Above him there was a light, and it was swelling and growing. A soft light, that was at once pure white and many colours. A light like bright sunlight reflected on a pale wall, and for that reason as he saw it he recalled the sun. He had forgotten that such a thing existed, but now the thought of that once familiar sun surrounded and filled him, and he swam again. He caught the cruel current off-guard and slipped from its grasp. He swam and swam, up towards that lambent ceiling, towards that great spread of light that held back the void.
And he raised his hand to touch it, and his fingers broke the surface.
And he opened his eyes.
For a long time he just stared, trying to make the shapes he saw conform. He was looking upwards and it seemed bright to him but not as bright as it might. The oil lamp in the corner of his vision was burning clearly, not drowned in sunlight. He saw a ceiling, a real ceiling, but it sloped madly away from him.
He wanted to ask what he was doing there, but he could not grasp why he should be anywhere.
Who was he, again? Surely someone had mentioned it.
He reached back, and found his fingers stained with the murk of the void. Was that all? Had he been conceived in that no-place, and vomited forth into this? No, there must be more than that. He felt the weight of the memories penned there inside, and reached for them again.
One by one they fell back into his skull.
He was a child learning his letters, the elderly Grasshopper-kinden woman making their shapes in the earth with her stick, and he copying on his tablet.
He was at the court of the Felipes, competing in footraces and in the air, learning sword and bow, flirting with the middle daughter of the family. He had gained a reputation already.
News had come of the war. He waited with the two Felipe boys who were his closest companions. The oldest was in his armour. He was going to the front, by choice. None of it seemed real.
The ghost of his father, just the husk of a voice speaking in a darkened room, invisible save for perhaps a wisp of cobwebby substance above the head of the ancient Mantis mystic who was calling the shade forth. It had been so long since he saw the man.
