Fifteen

A crowd had gathered in one of Khanaphes’s great plazas. Merchants and artisans and farmers clumped together, looking up at the balcony from which, traditionally, the city’s leaders had formerly made pronouncements, passing on the words of the unseen Masters.

Now the balcony bore a less familiar burden, as a handful of Beetle-kinden Ministers was overshadowed by the presence of the Empire. However, the most imposing presence belonged not to the Wasp-kinden officers, nor the Mantis bodyguards, but to the Empress Seda herself. For all that she was such a slight and unassuming figure, something about her instantly drew the eye and held it. No Spider Arista possessed such raw presence as she did, looking out over the anxiously milling people of Khanaphes.

Across the street, from the window of a merchant factora, Praeda and Amnon watched as one of the Ministers stood forth to address the populace.

‘That’s not Ethmet,’ the big man murmured. ‘Why isn’t the First Minister there?’

Praeda shrugged. ‘You tell me,’ she replied, resting a hand on his arm. ‘These are your people. When I was here last I’d have said that very little the Ministers did made many kinds of sense.’

The foremost Minister standing on the balcony – at this distance just an anonymous old man – held out his hands, and the citizens below quietened swiftly. ‘People of Khanaphes, rejoice!’ he declared, with all apparent sincerity. ‘Rejoice for the friendship of a new Empire!’

The people below did not seem minded to spring into instant celebration, but merely stared upwards cautiously. Praeda guessed many of them would have heard how this selfsame Empire had been behind the ruinous Scorpion attack of the previous year, from which the city was so plainly still recovering. To have such a large Imperial force insert itself effortlessly within their walls caused them understandable concern.

‘The Honoured Foreigners of the Wasp Empire have heard of our troubles,’ the Minister pressed on stoically. ‘They are deeply grieved that renegades from within their own borders may have incited the Scorpions of the Nem to attack our walls.’ Nothing in the Minister’s assured delivery acknowledged just how swiftly those walls had been brought down, or the terrible cost of that assault. Khanaphes, city of ten thousand years, did not like to dwell on its own defeats.

Praeda shifted at the window, wishing she could get her telescope out, but knowing that, at this angle, sunlight might flash from the lens and draw Imperial attention. Amnon had talked his way into this place, the merchant that owned it was surely somewhere in the crowd outside, and she was still worried that word might already have reached the government that their errant son, their former First Soldier, had returned.

‘So it is,’ the Minister was saying, ‘that the Honoured Foreigners wish to make amends. Even today they will be taking their soldiers off into the Nem, with all their fearful artifice, there to confront and slay as many of the despoiling Scorpions as they can find. These foreigners, our friends, shall thus take the blood of the Many in recompense for the harm their rebellious subjects have done here. They tell us that, after they are done, we need not fear the return of the Scorpions for five hundred years!’

For a moment there was silence, as the listeners digested this statement. Then a few scattered cries of approbation heralded the floodgates opening, and a moment later, everyone was cheering – cheering the black and gold. Praeda wondered whether any of it was spontaneous, or whether the Ministers had orchestrated every last echo.

‘This is how they hope to keep the Wasps off their backs, is it?’ she mused aloud.

Amnon hissed, ‘Praeda,’ in warning tones, and a moment later she heard the sound of sandals scuffing on stone steps as several people ascended the stairs from the factora’s ground floor. She turned to see that Amnon had already drawn his sword: a well-crafted Helleron piece, and not the leaf-bladed weapon he had taken away on his departure from this city. She had a similar short blade herself strapped to the inside of the pack lying at her feet, and now she rested a hand on the hilt, waiting.

She had certainly not expected to see Ethmet, but the leading pair of feet to arrive belonged to none other than Khanaphes’s First Minister. The man and woman following him were outfitted in the gorgeous gold-edged scale mail of the Royal Guard, but they themselves looked young and green: surely replacements brought in after the Scorpions had been defeated. Though not amongst those commanded by Amnon during the city’s defence, they still eyed the big man with awe and reverence. Exiled though he was, his name still resonated within the city’s walls.

There was an awkward silence between them that the sound of the crowd outside could not break into. Then Ethmet spoke: ‘They told me you had returned.’

Amnon still held his sword to hand. ‘If you believe that I have come begging for pardon, you are mistaken,’ he stated. ‘If you intend threatening me with the law of Khanaphes for defying my banishment, then you have forgotten who I am. These children will not suffice.’ He looked directly into the faces of Ethmet’s guards. ‘They will not even stand against me.’

‘No, no.’ Ethmet’s voice, that had quieted angry crowds in its time, emerged weak enough that Praeda had to lean closer to hear it. ‘I just came to . . . to see you. An old friend . . .’

Amnon frowned suspiciously. ‘You seem to like your new friends well enough to have no need of old ones. We saw you bow the knee.’

‘Amnon, you do not understand.’ The old man’s voice cracked on the last word and, suddenly shaking, his legs gave way. One of his men lunged forward to catch him, and guide him over to a stone bench. To her embarrassment, Praeda saw tears on Ethmet’s withered cheeks.

‘The Masters,’ he got out. ‘The Masters . . .’

‘There are no Masters,’ Amnon said firmly. He put a lot of conviction into those words, and indeed Praeda had talked with him repeatedly about the archaic beliefs of the Khanaphir. Most of the time, Amnon came across as quite the rationalist Beetle-kinden, interested in machinery and progress and better ways of doing things. She knew him well, though, and there were times when his mind still played host to the superstitions of his upbringing.

‘You are wrong!’ Ethmet hissed. ‘You saw them sweep the Scorpions from the city, at the last.’

‘At the last?’ Amnon demanded hotly. ‘Old man, you had better hope that there are no Masters, for if there are, what manner of creature are they to let their servants suffer so, to see so many of their people die, to see their own army defeated, if all along they possessed such power?’

Amnon obviously expected Ethmet to rally at this, to curse him for his blasphemy, but the old man’s shoulders kept shaking, and his words were momentarily lost as he fought to control himself.

‘I believe in the Masters,’ Ethmet forced out at last, ‘and I believe I have always done their will as best I could. But it is for me as a man hearing the echo of a voice from distant rooms, so perhaps I have not always understood. Perhaps, sometimes, I thought I heard them when they were silent, or they spoke and I did not listen. But . . . I believe in the Masters now. They are awake. They speak, and if I myself can hear only the faintest whisper of their words, she hears them clear, whether she knows it or not. Oh, I knelt, Amnon. I knelt because the Masters told us to, all of us. It was only the echo of an echo, but I have never heard them clearer. I could not have kept a straight leg if I had wished to. She is here because of the Masters, Amnon. She means more to the Masters than do I and all my ancestors together for five hundred years.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Amnon admitted. He glanced at Praeda, who put a hand on his arm, trying to comfort him.

Ethmet was crying quietly again. ‘We have served them all this time. We have done what we thought the Masters . . . the Masters . . . what they wanted. We have failed them. We have grown away from them, from generation to generation. We are not fit tools for them, and so they reach out to others: first that Collegium girl, and now the Empress of all the Wasps. Even these foreigners are more beloved of the Masters than we are.’

Amnon and Praeda exchanged uncomfortable looks, on seeing the First Minister of the Khanaphir so comprehensively undone. In Praeda’s mind, though, a phrase resurfaced. ‘That Collegium girl’ . . . Che?

That morning, in her mirror, she had seemed to see another face. She was Seda the First, Empress of the Wasps, a countenance revered and reproduced across the Empire, and yet, for a moment, her pale, fine features had been overlaid by those of a Beetle woman, of all things: a serious-looking girl of close to her own age. Seda had locked eyes with that phantom until it had faded.

It was not the first time, either. She knew the same face from fragmentary dreams, briefly glimpsed in standing water or reflected in glass. Most of the time the face itself went unseen, though, for her own mind’s eye sat behind it and stared out . . .

Seda had stood on the city’s western walls, those parts that had not been tested by the Imperial ordnance brought against them by the Many of Nem, and watched the Empire’s punitive force set off. It was expected of her, for all that she understood very little of it. It reminded her of that strange little meeting in the Scriptora: the colonel of Engineers, the two disgraced artificers and the Iron Glove’s halfbreed, all talking so knowledgeably about things that she could not understand. Not one of them had guessed at her ignorance or, if they had, they had assumed it was the simple lack of knowledge fitting for someone Apt but untrained. In reality they might as well have been making animal noises when they spoke of their craft, but she had been well briefed. She did not need to know how their machines worked. She only needed to know the result. They might claim to have an engine that would tear down a wall, but all that mattered to her was that the wall fell. She relied on people such as Gjegevey to brief her.

She knew, for example, that an observer from a more mechanically minded city than Khanaphes might wonder about the large quantity of machinery that this punitive force was taking into the desert with it: machinery that would seem to serve little martial purpose. However, once away from the city walls, any such observer would be advised to keep his or her distance.

And it was not all lies, either. Certainly the Scorpion-kinden were in for a rude awakening in the near future, for any tribe of the Many of Nem luckless enough to get within sight of this expedition would be wiped out. There would be Scorpion heads aplenty to satisfy the Khanaphir. After all, we are here as friends, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy.

So now Majors Angved and Varsec had departed, off to undertake their incomprehensible task in the desert: their peculiar mechanical mining for this mineral oil that the artificers had been so impressed with. So much for the Empire’s formal purpose in coming to this place.

She was left here as an honoured guest in the city, with enough well-trained soldiers to ensure that she could make the place an Imperial protectorate at any moment she chose. No doubt her people expected that, once having shown her face here, she would be back inside the airship and heading to the capital soon enough.

But she had another purpose, too. Gjegevey’s stories of the city had whetted it, but she had forged the idea for herself beforehand.

My dreams, she reflected, but that was not quite accurate. Better to say ‘the dreams’, because, for all that she had woken from them, they came from another’s mind entirely: the stone halls, the statues, the carvings, the darkness, the colossal tombs that were not tombs at all . . .

And the power, that naked, palpable power, it had called out to her across all the miles, until she had woken three nights running with the name ‘Khanaphes’ on her lips. And now she was here, and this mundane city was hers, but beneath her was a power unmastered and ancient.

Waiting . . .

Nights in Khanaphes were cool but not cold. The stone of the city seemed to have some secret treaty with the sun, holding back just sufficient of its daytime heat to stave off the dark’s chill. Outside the Imperial embassy, the vast star-pocked sky seemed to suck all warmth and light towards itself, untrammelled by cloud, the constellations seeming to loom impossibly close.

Seda stood in the Place of Foreigners, the ornamental square at the heart of the various embassies that the Khanaphir had put up for their foreign guests, a thousand years before, when their city had still been clinging to the skirts of greatness. The statues of the great powers of yesteryear regarded her and judged her impartially: Spider, Mantis, Moth, Woodlouse, and of them all perhaps only the Spider-kinden remained a power in this world. Her own people were not represented: when these stone faces were chiselled out with such exacting skill, the Wasp-kinden had been no more than savages. Even in her grandfather’s day they had been so. That they were now the greatest nation the world had ever seen made her proud of her people, of her bloodline. We were not born emperors and conquerors. We have earned the right to own the world. But my people know only half of the world, can see and touch only a part of the whole. How lucky for them, then, that I am here to provide a bridge to those invisible powers that they cannot guess at.

Overhead, the constellations drew pictures in the sky for her, patterns that the Moth-kinden had names for back when the Wasps had barely grasped the skill of metalwork, and perhaps those names had been coined here, originally, from the wisdom of the Masters of Khanaphes.

Before she had changed, before Uctebri’s rituals and her brother’s death, she had seen only points of light up there. Now she saw great forms striding across the sky, and she knew that the same forms had been known to the Inapt peoples of the world since the start of time.

Her guards had not seen her come out to stand here, and her staff believed her asleep in her chamber. It was a simple piece of misdirection to have them look elsewhere as she passed. In all the embassy, only one knew that she had departed it, and he had followed, his footsteps dragging softly on the stone flags. That he had stepped outside would not be remarked on. He was an old slave, for all his prestigious influence, and few cared where old slaves chose to walk, so long as they were present to fulfil their duties later.

‘Gjegevey,’ she said.

‘Your, mmm, Imperial Majesty,’ came his quiet voice. She sensed the presence of the tall, hunchbacked Woodlouse-kinden at her shoulder.

‘It must be tonight,’ she said. ‘The call is too strong, and I feel that if I let another dawn pass me by, then I will fail in some test. Or they will think me afraid. I am not afraid, Gjegevey.’

‘I am sure you are not, although were I, hmm, in your position, I would fear for my very being,’ he said diplomatically.

She turned then and took his hand, feeling it lean and angular with bone, his skin dry and smooth, his Art making it feel harder than skin should. He had gone still, knowing that Empresses did not touch slaves, or at least not slaves who wished to live.

‘Do not fear me, Gjegevey.’

He said nothing, but when she looked across to the archway leading from the Place of Foreigners to the square before the Scriptora, his eyes followed hers.

‘This is not wise,’ he whispered.

‘I came here for no other reason. The old powers of this place must respect me, must recognize me, and they shall never do that if I slink away like a whipped slave. I will go to them tonight. I cannot take my guards or my servants, my spymasters or my artificers. None of these can understand, and likely they would die. There is only one of my retinue who might be of use to me in penetrating those dark tombs.’

He met her gaze, but only for a moment before he lowered his eyes. ‘Surely your, ahm, Mantis-kinden . . .’

‘Not there, Gjegevey. Not in that place. Faced with what we shall find there, I do not know if my bodyguards would remain true to me. Only you shall accompany me.’

‘You ask a great deal of your slave, ah, Majesty.’ For a moment his withered face was screwed up, lines upon lines, but then he mastered himself. ‘Well, it has been many centuries since one of my kind went to visit the Masters of Khanaphes, even assuming the old stories are true. I shall be your guardsman and your servant and your, mm, intelligencer on this journey, Majesty, and should we ever see the sky again I shall be thankful.’

‘Then follow me,’ she said imperiously, and strode off towards the arch that linked the Place of Foreigners with the government of Khanaphes. The night, as well as her own skills, would prevent any Apt eyes from seeing her. Her soldiers kept a close lookout, but of all things, they did not expect to see their Empress walking past in a white gown, all alone save for her aged Woodlouse adviser.

The Scriptora was dark save for one window picked out by the dim glow of a rush-light, some diligent clerk labouring into the night. Even should he look up from his calligraphy, she trusted in her skills to cloud his eyes. These Khanaphir were but Beetle-kinden, chained by their Aptitude, and yet without any of the material advantages their cousins elsewhere enjoyed.

That is because the Masters do not desire them to change, the thought came to her, and she knew it to be true. The lurking power that dwells beneath this city has influence yet.

At the centre of the square fronting the Scriptora stood that squat, stepped pyramid with its flat top, about which stood an irregular placement of statues in white stone. They were not Beetle-kinden, nor Wasp nor any other race that Seda had known, and they were carved to be twice the height of normal men and women, giants looking over the city with a proprietorial eye.

And there they are. They were but stone, but Seda felt an echo there in their cold, disdainful likenesses, their distant beauty. They are the Masters, whom I must now seek out. Her dreams recurred to her: the darkness below, the pale forms striding through it. It was as though she had made this journey before. Even as she ascended the pyramid’s steps, she knew that there would be a shaft at its apex, ringed and guarded by those statues. That was the path. It was the only path.

She took the steps carefully, wondering partway whether the city had been this silent for long or whether, as her imagination fancied, she had stilled all other sound by her ascent. Some part of her felt that, on reaching the top, she should somehow become of equal stature with the great stone forms, and ready to take her place amongst them, but instead they dwarfed her, which made her feel angry.

Gjegevey took longer to join her, struggling over each step. At the last he stopped and doubled over, and she let him catch his breath while she stared up at the stars.

‘The most ancient tales of my, ah, people,’ the Woodlouse slave got out, ‘said that we were taught our earliest crafts by this vanished kinden, that our letters, our philosophy, all have their seed in the learning brought to us in the elder times by those who had been Masters here, and left Khanaphes to travel and teach the savage lesser kinden elsewhere.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘Of course, I am reminded of the, hmm, Spider-kinden, who will have you believe that without them the sun would fall from the sky – and they’ll convince you of it, too, if you let them. There is no story ever told that can be separated from the interests of the teller.’

‘You urge caution, then?’ Seda asked him.

‘My Empress, if to urge caution would help, then we would not be here. But . . . if they should stand before you in the majesty and grandeur of ten thousand years, do not forget, mn, all you are, and all you have achieved. There are many kinds of greatness in the world.’

For a long time she regarded him with a solemn scrutiny that would have made any other subject tremble and sweat, but he knew that a smile would appear eventually.

‘I shall not forget,’ she promised. ‘Now, we shall descend and then, if I have a destiny, I shall find it here in that darkness, or not at all.’

Che awoke, staring upwards into pitch darkness, her Art nevertheless picking out the spider in its circular web.

What was the ruler of the Wasp-kinden doing in that ancient city? And why did Che’s mind send her there every night that her dreams were lucid enough to remember?

And when I was there myself, walking beneath Khanaphes and seeing what I saw, was the Empress seeing me the same way as I see her now?

She had no control over this strange link with the Wasp Empress. It was part of the great magical world that she had been thrust into, vast and trackless and hostile, and yet it had become her new home.

The thought came to her, not for the first time, that there were magicians aplenty in the Commonweal. If anyone could help her understand this new life, then surely some Dragonfly mystic would spare her the time. Surely that was the reason for this lunatic journey in the first place?

No. I am here for Tynisa, to save her . . . Each day Che had to remind herself of that, at least once. Her concern for her foster-sister was steadily being eclipsed by her dreams, and by something else, too: this new world she was a native of concealed a wellspring of power, a power able to change the world in ways that the Apt could never conceive. If she learned just a little more, surely she could reach out and take a little of that power for herself? And then what might she not do? Even if it had fallen into decay, surely magic could still accomplish anything.

Tynisa, she reminded herself. Just think of Tynisa.

But her dreams were all of the Empress and her kindred quest to understand the ancient powers. However far Che travelled, Tynisa seemed ever more distant.