‘Then they will provide the stakes,’ Axrad suggested. ‘We two shall duel, and if you happen to defeat me, our soldiers here will let everyone depart where they will, either go to fight again or go to flee. Is that clear, Sergeant?’
Che did not hear the other man’s response but assumed it must have been positive.
Taki slipped the crossbow back into the Esca’s canopy. She headed around her machine’s wing as though to see Axrad better, but when she was passing nearest to Che she said, ‘They won’t keep their side. He means it, but I bet they don’t. Once I’m in the air, get going. They’ll be busy watching us, and not you.’
In a louder voice, intended to carry to Axrad, she announced, ‘I’m all yours. Let me wheel my Esca onto the field, and then we’ll finish our business.’
Twenty-Three
‘This must be Lowlander work,’ the Emperor Alvdan hissed. He stood in his nightshirt, a dozen guards gathered about him. One fist was pressed nervously into his chin. ‘This can be no coincidence.’
‘It seems likely, your Imperial Majesty,’ Maxin allowed. He was not going to tell the Emperor that his own agents had sensed no warning of this, nor caught any Lowlander spies. Let us hope the Emperor asks no questions about this, he thought. Today was not the greatest day for the Rekef and, whoever had failed in this, Maxin was the man standing here with the Emperor in the pre-dawn darkness.
The word received had been that urgent: Major Berdic had been emphatic and his messenger insistent. The sight of the Fly-kinden man marching into the palace, in order to rouse the Emperor and the master of the Rekef, would stay with Maxin for some time. The man’s face had exhibited blank fear, but he had witnessed the plight of Szar and he knew his duty. Maxin had been forced to commend him for it.
‘If Szar… goes, how does it affect our campaign?’ Alvdan asked.
‘Hardly at all, your Majesty,’ Maxin assured him. ‘More in logistics than any serious threat to your power. And rest assured that Szar will not leave our hands. Somehow the news has got to these backward people that their Queen is dead.’ He felt a moment’s qualm in saying it before the guards, by force of long habit, but the secret had somehow leaked out despite all his precautions. Another failure attributable to his Rekef, if the Emperor should enquire further. Best to keep the man’s mind on the problem and not the causes of it. ‘Our manufacturing in the West-Empire will be disrupted until these rebels are put down, of course, but we have the Beetle city of Helleron to take up the slack as far as production goes. There is really only one matter worth troubling you with, your Imperial Majesty, and that is how far to go in punishing the Bee-kinden for their audacity.’
‘Punishment?’ Alvdan queried, the word bringing him back to himself. ‘Do not think that we are a fool, General. Revolution is like a disease, and just one infected city can make it spread. We read the reports, and not just yours either. We know Myna was close to an explosion last year, and simmers still. It was not so long since Maynes was also in open revolt. The whole West-Empire has been turbulent since the Twelve-Year War. We do not underestimate this development, General. We cannot shrug it off. Something therefore must be done.’ He lowered his fist at last, glaring about him at his guards. ‘Something final, General, because we have relied on Szar for too long. The Bee people are stubborn: they submit their backs to the lash and care not.’
‘Your Majesty?’
Alvdan’s eyes were now quite clear, and his voice quite calm. ‘We have pre-empted you, General – even before this latest news. When we first heard that Szar was stirring, we realized that they had heard. We knew that they would rise up, because she… she was the only thing holding them in check. When her leash finally snapped, we knew they would make their pathetic attempt at freedom. Now Colonel Gan has lost the Princess, who will become Queen, and they will all be up in arms. Your reinforcements will not hold them. No, we need a greater rod to chastise them with than just the army.’
Maxin glanced sidelong at the surrounding guards but they remained carefully expressionless. The Emperor thus taking the initiative in this matter was an unwelcome development. Alvdan was no fool, but Maxin was not wholly sure of his judgment. After all, he was supposed to live on a diet of whatever Maxin fed him, and that did not always include the entire truth.
‘If I may ask…’ he began slowly.
‘Oh, General, look at you!’ Alvdan said, with a bright smile. ‘Do you think we don’t need you any more? Non-sense! You are still our closest advisor. Our… no, we shall not quite call you brother.’
I remember well what I did to your brothers, on your command, Maxin thought.
Alvdan was plainly thinking the same thing. ‘We would call you a friend, save that Emperors have none. You are chief amongst our servants, and you must be satisfied with that.’
‘An honour, your Majesty,’ Maxin confirmed.
‘Of course. General, we now intend to make an example of Szar,’ Alvdan explained. ‘We have sent for a very special man, an executioner. He shall teach the provinces that the Empire is to be obeyed in all things, meekly and instantly. There shall be no spreading of revolution. Every city in the Empire shall know the name of Szar. It shall be the key to unlock all future revolutions, the cure for the infections of rebellion for all time to come.’
‘But who have you summoned, Majesty?’ said Maxin, almost impatiently.
Alvdan uttered a name, and it was a moment before Maxin had rifled through his capacious memory, but then he understood.
Maxin was a killer, who had taken the life of others for his own advancement so many times, and had countless more killed on his orders, but when he now put the idea together, the latest reports, the results of the tests, he shivered a little.
Szar is about to enter the histories, he considered. In fact the histories may be the only place left for it, when this is done.
He said I would notice no change.
The mirror was a fine piece of work in the shape of an hourglass, with a frame wrought from gold and silver filigree within which the shapes of dragonflies and butterflies hung suspended on fine wires. This was some trophy from the Twelve-Year War which had ended up, when nobody else had wanted it, here in her chambers.
It showed Seda only what she had always seen: a pale-skinned and slender Wasp-kinden woman, hair coiled neatly atop her head, with a vulnerability in her gaze that had been bred by long exposure to death and the cruel whims of her brother. Seda brushed back a lock of hair, and tried to see in the glass any sign of the magic that Uctebri claimed to have imbued her with.
Magic is subtlety, he had explained. It is better to work with the properties that exist, than seek to create something that is not there. You are already an admirable specimen of your kinden, therefore I shall merely hone your beauty.
It struck her that nobody had ever used that word to describe her, and that it should be left to the decrepit, blood-marked Mosquito to speak it made her sad.
If Father had lived, where would I be now? Married, no doubt, though to no one of her choosing. Alvdan, her brother, had never considered matching her with anyone, not even with his closest lackey, Maxin. He feared the ambitions of any children she might produce, let alone the ambitions of any husband she took, which would grow just as inevitably.
The one blessing of the revolution, Uctebri had told her, is that it meant magic’s day had passed. Why a blessing, you may ask? You did not believe in magic before you and I met and, among your fellow Wasp-kinden, all the way through the whole Empire, there is no belief in it. Superstition, you say dismissively to yourselves: ancient myth and foolishness. Thus it is that the simplest tricks of any magician can blind all eyes, because you Apt all accept whatever happens to you as if it made some kind of mechanical sense. A man goes suddenly mad and slays his close friend and, where once he might have said, ‘I was enchanted,’ now he says, ‘He had it coming to him.’ He invents his motives after the event, and never thinks of the subtle influence that inspired him.