‘It seems that way,’ he said quietly.
‘And here you are, looking for a little work to tide you over?’
‘I want to fight,’ he told her.
‘Of course you do. It’s what you’re good at. Carpenters want to make things out of wood, and artificers want to tinker with machines, and you want to kill people. Why not? Go with your talents, that’s what I say.’
It was indeed what she said. He had heard it a dozen times before, at least. ‘What do you have for me?’ he asked.
‘It isn’t as easy as that, dear blade, not at all,’ she told him. ‘City’s under new management now.’
‘I refuse to believe the Wasps have put your trade out of business.’
She gave him a bleak smile. ‘Not quite, Tisamon, not quite. Your old stamping grounds have mostly gone, though. It’s like the end of an era. All that gang-fighting, street-fighting, where you made your name: gone now, the lot of it. The Empire has been rooting out any fiefs that won’t bow the knee. The only work I could get you in that direction would be signing up for your own suicide with those few still holding out.’
Tisamon nodded, thinking.
‘On the other hand, if you were interested in something a little different…’ Her bright smiles were less convincing than her bleak ones.
‘Tell me.’
‘The Wasps have brought in a new kind of entertainment. They’re very keen on it, and so all the locals who want in with them are keen on it too, though it’s a little… gauche.’
‘Prize fighting,’ Tisamon filled in.
‘It’s not like the skill-matches the Ants have,’ Rowen warned. ‘Bloodsports – men against animals, or a duellist against a pack of unarmed slaves or prisoners. Nothing honourable, Tisamon. Not your line, I’d have thought.’ She watched him keenly. ‘But if you were interested, I could make the arrangements. It’s very new, and anyone can put up a fighter. Slaves get entered, mostly, but there’s no law about it…’
And so you have found your new place in the order, Tisamon considered, and did not know if he meant the woman or himself.
‘Arrange it,’ he told her.
Seda had never before seen the Mosquito in anything other than robes of black, or the imperial colours her brother sometimes dressed him in, but now she had discovered him, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the mirror room, surrounded by a glitter of candles. He was swathed in pale clothing that was as tight on his limbs as bandages, secured by ribbons of red tied at his elbows, wrists and knees. His otherwise uncovered head had a band of dark cloth circling his brow, making the white flesh of his skull look more corpse-like than ever.
‘What are you dressed as, sorcerer?’ Seda asked acidly, once the guard had left. That she was now allowed to be alone and unwatched with Uctebri was a recent occurrence, and she did not know whether it was down to her brother the Emperor’s preoccupations elsewhere, or to Uctebri’s subtle influence.
When he lifted his head to look at her, she took an automatic step back, because there was something in that skull-face that she had never seen before.
Satisfaction, she realized: naked, gloating satisfaction. His bloody eyes, that raw, shifting mark half-covered by his headband, pulsed scarlet and wild. His lips pulled back into a grin that showed her every pointed, fish-like tooth in his head.
He lifted his hands towards her, and within them was clasped a gnarled wooden box, its surface carved and carved over again.
‘Through hardship and travail…’ he hissed. ‘Through blood and fire, treachery and theft, it is here. The Rekef have prevailed at last. And the box is mine.’
She made herself regard him coldly. ‘And was it worth it?’
‘A thousandfold,’ he said. He rose smoothly, all pretence of age and infirmity now gone, and she wondered whose blood he was replete with, to have given him his youth back. ‘I have just been performing certain introductions. This garb of mine, these ribbons, there is nothing magical in them. They are, however, symbols that have significance to certain things from a certain time. I have thus identified myself to them, so they will not turn their influence onto me.’
‘Where will this influence fall, then?’ she asked him.
‘Where I will it, or where it will, so long as it does not meddle with my plans,’ Uctebri replied. His robe had been discarded by one wall, and he retrieved it with one spindly arm and shrugged it on, still holding tightly to the box with the other hand. She had the odd idea that he had seen himself through her eyes for a moment, and found himself feeling self-conscious.
‘This box,’ she said. ‘Is it something for your amusement, or does it bear on what we must do?’
‘How goes your work?’ he asked, drawing his cowl up. She thought that he sounded disappointed, almost. Had he wished her to seem more impressed?
‘I have some colonels on my side, Brugan among them. I flatter old Governor Thanred, for what little influence he has left. A major of engineers, a major of the Slave Corps, two factors of the Consortium, all with me now. Disappointed and passed-over men, the ambitious and the vengeful. I am spinning my webs as if I was born a Spider.’
‘Good,’ Uctebri said. ‘Then, in answer to your question, the Shadow Box does not merely bear on our plans; it is the plan. Life and death, my princess, both reside within this box, and are there for me to draw upon. Life, for you, and death…’
She raised a hand before he could say it, even though she knew they could not be overheard. I cannot trust you, can I? She knew he must be planning to control her as a puppet ruler of his Empire. Still, he gives me more chance than my brother. ‘It seems very small,’ she said, archly disdainful. ‘I do wonder whether you do not throw this object in my way simply to amaze and mystify me.’
His grin broke out again now, within the confines of his hood. ‘My dear doubting princess, do you believe in ghosts?’
She made to say that of course she did not, but he was so plainly waiting for this response that she just gave him an uninterested shrug.
‘I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,’ he told her. ‘Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.’ His hand came out of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon.
‘If you say so.’
‘Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,’ he said patiently. ‘But when you think, it is different. Your thinking snarls the fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how very simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an enchanter.’ With a swift intertangling of his fingers, there was now a lumpy knot in the centre of the ribbon.
She managed to shrug again. ‘I cannot deny that you have a power, Mosquito. I cannot think to ever understand it – and I think it is better I do not.’
‘Perhaps.’ He grinned at her. ‘What happens, though, after you die? What happens to the knot?’ He pulled at the tape’s ends sharply, and the knot had vanished, as though it had never been. ‘Alas, unravelled in an instant, my princess.’ His grin was conspiratorial. ‘But what if it were not?’
‘I… do not understand.’
‘The body gone – dead, rotten, decay and then dust – but the knot of mind still there, trapped within the weave, impossible to undo.’ Now he was moving about the room, pinching out candle-flames between his fingertips, bringing on a gloom that she felt must match the evening outside.
‘I do not see how that can be.’
‘But then you do not understand any of what I say, for you merely see the convenient images I speak of,’ he said. ‘Laetrimae, would you come forth? Drama now requires it.’