‘My Lord Governor Tegrec,’ greeted Xaraea, who had been waiting at the door with every appearance of calm. Achaeos knew his own people, though: she was the centre point, the knot that was holding this fragile arrangement together, and she knew it. The weight of all her people was on her, and he could detect the minute signs of strain. Achaeos had found in himself a growing coldness for his people, for their isolationism, their hostility to the world and particularly to Che’s kin. In contrast he admired Xaraea. She had delivered herself into the very hands of the Empire in order to save the Moths.
Tegrec, this new governor, was not impressive for a Wasp: short and stout and garishly dressed, Still he put on a show, looking over the conquered people with the proper disdain before waving to his escort. ‘You may leave us.’ It was not recklessness in the face of danger that he displayed, but the confidence of a man who knows in his heart that the enemy is beaten.
The soldiers retreated, and Tegrec waited, as if listening while their footsteps receded, the light of their lanterns dimming and dying away. That left only the two torches the Mantis servant had lit to flare and gutter and cast shadows about the little room.
Tegrec smirked. That was the only word for the expression that crossed his face. He cast a look back in the direction of his retreating soldiers and smirked. A tension, perhaps an entirely manufactured tension, then left the room. His Mantis carer lowered Achaeos back to the floor, where he sat cross-legged and watched the Wasp governor of Tharn don a black robe and go native. Tegrec held onto the last rags of his sombre mood until his girl had finished tugging the garment into shape, and then smiled at them, and perhaps at himself.
‘My Lord Governor,’ the Skryre said, standing almost hidden in the folds of her robe, a coiled staff in one hand. Like all Skryres, and like most Moth-kinden of station, she had not revealed her name.
Tegrec looked from her to Achaeos, and then himself sat down. In the robe, he could have been a somewhat bulky Moth student ready to learn from his teachers. That is what he is – Achaeos had not quite believed it, when they had told him – a Wasp seer, and mostly self-taught, but here he is learning from the masters.
Xaraea seated herself as well, as did the slave-girl. The aged Skryre took a few halting steps.
‘This is Achaeos,’ she declared. ‘He comes to us from the Lowlands, where your people make war.’
Tegrec nodded.
‘We are approaching a time of crisis, Tegrec,’ said the Skryre. By naming him, while herself remaining nameless, she shaped her authority over him. ‘You, especially, face such a time too. Do you understand me?’
‘I believe I do.’ The Wasp still smiled.
‘Our bargain holds, does it not?’
‘I have no complaints.’ He glanced at the girl beside him, and Achaeos saw that, with the guards now gone, the distance between master and slave had relaxed as well.
‘You have been an able student,’ the Skryre admitted. ‘You have achieved more than we might have expected, from your kind.’
Tegrec looked directly at Achaeos, as though trying to read him. In returning the favour Achaeos discerned a man out of his depth, and yet who was still swimming further away from shore.
What must it have been like, to grow up in a different world to all those around you? The division between the Apt and the Inapt was the defining line between the burning new and the fading old. There were so few that could even get close enough to see into the other side. He thought of Che, then, who had been willing to join him on that border, close enough for them to touch hands. He found himself respecting this Tegrec for what he must have achieved. Taking on the Empire with a handful of magical tricks, and then carving out his own place in it, must have been difficult for him. It probably still was.
‘You are asking me to make an exchange,’ Tegrec said at last. He glanced at his girl once again. ‘You want to change our arrangement?’
‘We have tried to hold back change for many centuries,’ the Skryre remarked drily. ‘We discover that it cannot be done, so, yes, there will be change.’
‘I understand what you are asking of me,’ Tegrec said, ‘but perhaps you do not understand what you are asking me to give up.’
The Skryre’s lips twitched. ‘This Achaeos you see here, he knows, for he is here only as a brief gap in his exile. He has chosen life with our enemies, rather than with his own. Still, he is here, which shows that loyalty to the great mysteries overcomes all else. Can you yourself look upon your Empire, your rank, your years of time-serving, and say, “This is a thing I cannot let go of”?’
‘I must think on this,’ Tegrec insisted.
‘Do not think overlong,’ the Skryre warned him.
After doffing the robe, Tegrec stepped from the room and rejoined his Wasp escort, but he said nothing to them. He was still deep in thought.
I have always walked a line.
He was Major Tegrec, governor of the little-regarded city of Tharn, a chill and mountainous backwater taken by the Empire only because it was there, on the edge of their expanding frontier. The Moth-kinden, isolated and backward, had nothing to offer the Empire: poor warriors, poor labourers, a nation of recluses and hermits. Tegrec himself had already confirmed this to his superiors, reporting in just the right tones of resentful suffering.
Walking the line indeed, but he was a fiercely ambitious man, always pushing, always manipulating. He could not name any other major who was a governor, even of such an insignificant place as this. At the same time he was a cripple – enduring a carefully hidden mental deformity, an inability to conceive of what others found so natural. It leaked out, it showed, and he was not liked even by those who made use of him. They knew there was something unsound in him, and they had failed to root it out only because the barrier to understanding worked both ways. They could not imagine the world he lived in.
Since coming to Tharn, he had found another line to walk. He spit-shone his public face daily: the grim imperial governor of Tharn administrating this lonely, ancient eyesore, dealing with the complaints of his staff and soldiers, who were treating their assignment here as a punishment detail. Behind that face, however, he was a changed man. Before arriving here he had learnt his magic hand to mouth, from old books, or through ailing slaves from distant lands. He had come to Tharn with a piecemeal, patchwork knowledge that had eased his way within the Empire only because he used it like a conman would: they heard his words, saw his hands move the cups, and none of them could see why the ball was not where they had guessed. He had lived his whole life in fear that he would be uncovered, not as a fake but as the real thing. He had never named himself as a Seer.
The Moths, however, had named him as just that. The Moths were arrogant, exclusive, elitist, but what they looked for was not race or birth but talent. His scraps of understanding had been patched and stitched into whole cloth during his time here. His talent was unquestioned: they had never known a Wasp magician before. Perhaps there had never been one since the Days of Lore.
I do not belong here. But nor did he belong anywhere. He had burrowed his way through the Empire like a parasite, but here in Tharn he did not have to hide what he was. He would not be the first traitor the Empire had known, nor even the first traitor governor. He consoled himself with the thought that they would never understand, back in Capitas, why he had acted as he had.
He had made his choice.
Ten
Maintaining a force of cavalry was not part of the Wasp army’s mandate but General Praeter had seen enough of it during the Twelve-Year War to learn its uses. Regular horses were too fragile for a Wasp-kinden war, and so he now observed his men from the high-fronted saddle of an armoured beetle, extending ten feet from its mandibles to its tail. Around him the heavy war machines of the Sixth Army were grinding forwards with a mechanical determination that he knew was illusory. Machines regularly stopped working in the middle of battles, and he had never known a combat without some automotive simply falling silent at the worst possible time. He had therefore learnt not to rely on them.