He waited, but she let herself seem thoroughly absorbed by his words, perhaps a little cowed by them. He shuffled closer, until her guards tensed, and she lifted a hand to hold them back. She let the gaunt, robed figure approach until its hushed next words would be lost to most of her court, intended only for herself.
‘Majesty, we know what has happened to you, and what inheritance has come to rest within you. The Moths may claim it, but you must know they lie. Perhaps there are some dregs of their power in you, but Uctebri was your master, before now, and it is his tradition that has claimed you – our tradition. Who else can teach you of it, save us? And what will become of you, if you do not learn our ways?’ His lips quirked into a smile, showing the translucent needles of his teeth. ‘Or do you think the might of an empire is sufficient to master what lies within you?’
She stood up abruptly, and her court fell silent even as she did.
‘You are in error,’ she said, letting the soldiers and magnates of her court try to piece together precisely what words she was replying to. ‘You recall to us our brother’s slave, whom you claim as kin. You think to presume upon our favour through his name? I will not deny I knew him, and a cunning trickster he was, whom my brother found an endless fascination. Until he died, creature – until my dear, beloved brother was murdered.’
She sensed the tension all around her now, for this had been a topic brought out frequently in recent months. ‘Though a fighting slave held the blade, no single man could suffice to make an end to my brother,’ she said, and she had practised the emotions so well that nobody could have guessed how much she had laughed, the first time she mouthed those words. ‘We are even now uncovering the depths of the conspiracy that contrived his death.’ It was remarkable, how far that conspiracy had spread, starting from a Rekef general and a Mantis-kinden pit slave and then working outwards, like a plague caught by those who had incurred the Empress’s displeasure, that was uniformly fatal. ‘We know, though, for our Rekef has confirmed it, that at the heart of the knot was none other than my brother’s slave, so trusted and so well placed to betray the throne. You come here thus on a traitor’s business.’
Even as she finished speaking, the guards were moving in, but she was more interested in the peculiar sea-change affecting her courtiers. They were not themselves under the lens – none of them would be hauled off to the fighting pits or the crossed pikes today – and so abruptly they started putting on expressions of vengeful outrage, and looking forward to some entertainment.
‘We shall see them meet a fitting end, for the blood their kind has shed,’ she declared. ‘Have them hung by their heels, then have them bled by the wrists until not one drop remains within them.’ And she did not now say, and have that blood brought to me, but there were those of her staff who knew the drill, and went about her business with fat purses and lips sealed, lest they, too, encounter the same fate. The Mosquitos understood, though, for she saw it in their red eyes. ‘Do not assume,’ she told them, ‘that I am not fully educated as to your traditions. ’ Though her court would not understand, it was worth it for their expressions, before they were hauled away.
Invisible to her, there were some hundreds of people making ready within the palace and all across the city. Quartermasters, officers, engineers, chandlers, scouts, cartographers, diplomats, merchants and an army of slaves were smoothing her way so that the Empress’s path should be effortless, greased as it was with the sweat of all their brows.
Her brother Alvdan had never set foot outside the capital. If he had been able to avoid it, he had never left the palace, the scene of his one mean triumph where he had ordered the murder of his siblings at the hands of General Maxin. That the late and unlamented Maxin was now a keystone in the grand and convenient ‘conspiracy’ that Seda had woven around her brother’s death was a source of constant entertainment to her.
The Empire was changing, she knew. Its recent history, even its defeats, had strengthened it and broadened it, and she was not content to sit at home and merely try to fill her father’s shoes, the ones that her brother had tried on for size so many times and found too large for him.
My grandfather Alvric unified the tribes and defeated our nearest neighbours, and he was great in one way. My father Alvdan the First built an empire, and was great in another. My poor brother’s failing was in never finding his own path to greatness, but living off the table scraps of our family history. I have my own road now. And she did, and her forebears would never have guessed at it.
From the shade of her rooms she stepped out on to a balcony, into the bright sunlight, looking down the tiered flanks of the palace, over Capitas the golden city. The sky above it teeming with Wasps and Flies engaged on her errands, the streets coursing with her subjects, warehouses crammed with her treasures, barracks thronging with her armies. Above and to either side of her balcony, several of those soldiers tensed as soon as she showed herself, instantly casting their gaze skywards, in case any of her loyal subjects should harbour conspiratorial designs. Wasp Art furnished its devotees with wings and hands that were deadly at a distance, and for the Empress to stand thus in the open would be a gift to any assassin, which perhaps explained the late Emperor’s reclusive habits.
But I know more than you ever did, Seda reflected, because castigating her dead brother was another source of amusement to her. She was slowly mastering her newfound skills, but the ability to read others and to know of danger, and to turn minds, all these were increasingly within her grasp. Last year an assassin had broken into her very bedchamber. She had talked to him all through the night, and when the guards eventually found him, he was ready to swear undying allegiance to the throne.
She had ordered the intruder skinned alive.
Her shadows moved with her, her constant guards. They were gifts from the Moth-kinden of Tharn, and she knew that her regular soldiers worried about exactly where their loyalties lay. Only Seda could see their hearts, however, and she had twisted them, and twisted them again, by gifts and words, promises and understandings, until the half-dozen Mantis-kinden killers were hers through and through, pledged inviolably to her by their ancient knots of honour. They carried bows and the short-bladed clawed glove that only the Mantids cared for, and any assassins that wished to try their luck would find the Empress’s bodyguards waiting.
She heard the shuffle of feet behind her, and sensed her Mantis-kinden escort tense for a moment. There were few allowed in her chambers unbidden, though, and once they recognized the Woodlouse-kinden, Gjegevey, they relaxed again. The old slave was her favourite adviser, and a supporter of hers since before the Emperor’s death; and if she had learned one lesson from her brother’s failures it was to reward loyal service. More than that, though, Gjegevey understood what she was, what she had become, and what she wanted.
‘I, ahm, understand all is in readiness.’ To the Wasps he was a bizarre spectacle, outlandishly tall and thin, yet so crook-backed that it seemed that he was meant to be taller still. His skin was a pallid greyish-white, with darker bands starting at his forehead and patterning the top of his bald head before disappearing down beneath his robes behind. He claimed to be older than the Empire itself, but his eyes were sharp in their nest of wrinkles. His people dwelt north and east of Wasp lands, she understood, in some steaming swamp-forest of eternally rotting trees, and his kinden were seldom seen. Once, he had been an agent for whatever nebulous leadership existed amongst his scholarly and retiring fellows, but time had eroded the particulars of his original briefing, so now he was hers entirely.