‘Or perhaps it was a Fly-kinden messenger from Suon Ren bearing word from my old friend Felipe Shah,’ he added. ‘Shah believed that you might find yourself a little stranded here in Leose, so asked that I extend to you all hospitality due to an honoured ambassador from the Lowlands.’ For a man of his age he stood very straight, and despite his dress and circumstances she had a brief glimpse of the man he had been during the war. ‘If you wish it, that is.’
Tynisa thought again of Salme Alain, who would no doubt return home sooner or later. She thought of Gaved and Sef, whose resources were meagre and who would doubtless prefer to retain their privacy over the winter.
More than that, though, she thought of Felipe Shah, and of this old man now before her, two Dragonfly nobles whose war-wounds were borne on the inside, but who could still find charity for a stray Lowlander out of nowhere, penetrating all her angst and guilt and fretting about her purpose, she felt a moment’s sunlight touch her.
‘I wish it,’ she told Cean with profound gratitude.
Part Two
The Widow
Seven
The Empire had no great tradition of receiving ambassadors, yet these were not the first who had stood before Seda. They were the strangest, and most of her court did not know what to make of them. The great and good of the Wasp-kinden could not decide whether this was some kind of joke, or a calculated insult from an unknown power, on seeing these three cadaverous creatures standing before the throne.
The small proportion of her court who did understand what these visitors were, and what that signified, had gone quite still – like a cricket that spots the twitch of a mantis amongst the leaves. Those were themselves newcomers, a strange detritus of the Inapt that Seda had been quietly cultivating since she had secured her throne against the other would-be emperors who had begun carving off pieces of her rightful domain after her brother’s death. These other ambassadors – the Moth-kinden, the Grasshoppers, scholars and mystics and magi – stared at the three dark-robed creatures as though they were a nightmare come to life.
It was not just what they represented, that sparked such horror. Nor was it because these things were standing in the Empress’s court in broad daylight, whose true place was in the furthest, darkest holes away from the wrath of civilized peoples. It was a fear that these creatures might have a proposal for Seda: a promise of power that would be both greater and darker than those scraps of support that the Moth-kinden had been trying to get the Empress to accept. The price that would be exacted, in return for their gift of tainted power, threatened to undo centuries of bitter history.
The Mosquito-kinden had come to Capitas.
Seda watched them curiously. She had known only one of their kind before, although that one still cast a long shadow even after his death.
They had come to her in her dreams, these three. She was not sure whether they were scapegoat delegates forced by their fellows to undertake this task, or perhaps the boldest and most ambitious of a people sly and retiring by nature; or whether they were renegades cut off from their own kin and seizing on her unique position for a chance of reprieve. It was in dreams, however, that they had made themselves known, whispering promises of power, of understanding, even a twisted kind of comfort, extending a helping hand to draw her from the sea of blood that they knew she must be drowning in.
In her dreams they had been huge and cloaked in the night sky, their gaunt faces commanding. She had felt tiny before them.
Before her now, they were shorn of such grandeur: three haggard, pallid things, wrinkled and sexless. If it were not for those eyes, they would have seemed just some pack of ancient, mongrel beggars, not even worthy of the Slave Corps’ time. But their protuberant and glistening red eyes dominated their every expression with a naked, hungry gleam. One of them, too, had a patch of red across his brow, like a birthmark save that it seemed to shift fluidly as he glanced about the room in jerky motions.
There had been a war, she knew, for her adviser, Gjegevey, had told her that much. In some forgotten corner of the lost centuries, before her race had come into its own, the Moth-kinden, in their strength and wisdom, had broken the power of the Mosquitos, cast them down and saved the world from their thirst for blood and for dominion. Of course, as all the records were kept in their clever, grey-skinned hands, Seda had only their word for the rights and wrongs of it. As the Moths themselves were long since banished to a few mountain fastnesses by their own triumphant slaves, one might think the issue moot. Official Imperial history certainly did: the squabbles of the Inapt kinden in bygone days were not taught in Wasp schools.
She had surprised them, in the end, for as they had pillaged her dreams, whispering and promising, she had shown them only need and weakness, enticing them to creep from their haunts and converge on Capitas. Come to us, their voices had rustled in her mind. Be ours, sworn and sealed. How else will you ever control your new heritage?
When they were close enough to her walls, she had sent soldiers out for them with a polite but forceful invitation to the Imperial court. Here they were: three scraps of old night caught now in the daylight that her artificers funnelled into her throne room, through shafts and high-set windows. Had they come after dusk as they planned, they would have found no less of a glare from the gas lamps. She could see them flinching from it, all the progress and the newness, trying to steady themselves against the moving tide of history.
But she owed their kinden something, and that had earned them a public audience. Also, it did no harm to remind the Moths and the others that she was no creature’s toy, not theirs, nor the Mosquitos’.
‘You have travelled so very long to present yourselves to me,’ she said now, looking down on them from her central seat. On each side of her throne were three lesser seats where her brother had seated his advisers, but these days she seldom shared her glory with anyone. Had her regent been here, then perhaps she would have permitted him a place beside her, but they told her he was dead in some far-off city. Oh, the lies they thought she swallowed, when she could see through them all.
The three Mosquito-kinden had no doubt pictured this meeting differently: they as the masters, and she the meek supplicant. Their obvious discomfort amused her. ‘Speak,’ she encouraged them. ‘Surely such a great journey is of some great import. Have you a boon you wish to ask of me?’
Because they did not know precisely the corner they were backed into, or perhaps because they did, they found their courage from somewhere. One, the oldest and most haggard of the lot, stepped forward.
‘Empress,’ he began, his voice quiet yet carrying, which was an old trick of the Inapt. ‘Your most royal Majesty, you know who we are. The name of the Mosquito-kinden is not foreign to you.’
Seda heard the murmur echo about her court, among the Apt segments of it anyway. There were many there who still clung to the idea that the Mosquitos were nothing but a myth to frighten children with, either lost to time or merely a fiction from the start. There were enough, though, who remembered the Emperor Alvdan’s favourite slave, red-eyed and hungry-faced, a creature akin to these. Uctebri the Sarcad, he had called himself, and few recalled him fondly. Perhaps a few there even knew something of Uctebri’s appetites, of the servants and slaves he left pallid and shaking, and sometimes dead and withered, in his wake. In this new age of a young empress, perhaps it was time for the people of the Empire to reconsider their beliefs, Seda thought.
She had essayed a cautious nod, and the Mosquito-kinden spokesman took this as encouragement. ‘We bring you gifts,’ he claimed. ‘Gifts not of simple treasures, for who could match the treasury of an empire, but gifts of understanding. We see the old faces here at your court, of those who have persecuted and oppressed us throughout the ages. No doubt they claim that they will give you wisdom. We know all too well their narrow-minded creed, Majesty. They will piece out knowledge to you with a parsimonious hand, and pass you only those scraps from their table that they think you fit for. They would presume to judge an empress, believing that their own power is anything but a shadow in these days.’ The visible reaction of those he railed against emboldened him further. ‘Majesty, we are a people in hiding, for they would slay us even now, if they could. Let us serve you, let us teach you our lore, let us be your mentors in all the old ways. You shall find us more open-handed by far than these.’