The soldiers lined up before the imperial seats were now running forwards, drawing their shortswords, shouting for their companions to get out of the way. The soldiers stationed behind Uctebri and the princess were rushing to join them. Even the Emperor’s scribe had his pen-knife in his hand, ready to make a stand against this sudden incursion.
Tynisa stared helplessly, feeling the weight of the chains about her. She stared at her father in his moment of terrible glory. All around, the crowd were shouting, screaming, even cheering, a riot in the making, but her own world seemed to have gone silent. She saw only those two battling figures, continually eclipsed by the Wasp soldiers and then suddenly in sight again. She saw that Felise now had a bloody gash across her ribs, and the weal left by a sting’s near miss along her back. A soldier took his broken spear and managed to jam the point of it into Tisamon’s leg before the Mantis killed him. The wound did not seem to slow Tisamon at all. Tynisa felt tears coursing down her face. He cannot do it. There are too many of them.
She looked over at the hateful pale man beside her and understood that it was not his plan that Tisamon should succeed. Tisamon had already accomplished what he had been intended to do, and Uctebri the Sarcad was taking advantage of it.
He is perfect. Uctebri thrilled at seeing the Mantis weave through the storm of stings and spears and swords, with his jointed claw constantly in motion, cleaving again and again and casting the refuse aside. Beside him the Dragonfly woman was just as swift. He saw her sword dart and dive, her movements small and controlled and utterly savage, lopping at wrists and necks, goring unprotected throats and bellies. Then it got caught in the body of one of her victims and she abandoned it instantly, the claws of her thumbs folding out. Her presence was unexpected, and for a moment he even wondered, Can they…?
But they could not. More soldiers were arriving all the time, pushing their way around the edge of the arena or coasting across it, and if it had been possible for Alvdan to die at the hands of a pit-fighter then he would be dead already. Uctebri realized that he had been caught in the trap he had set for everyone else, staring in horror and fascination at the frenzied knot of bloodshed. He had work to do, and Tisamon and Felise, through their final flurry of skill, had gifted him with exactly what he needed. Nobody was watching him, or even the Emperor. As was proper for a pit fight, they had eyes only for the killing.
He glanced about, seeing that all the guards that had so recently surrounded him were now committed to the fight. With amusement he found that General Maxin, instead of rushing to his lord’s aid, had backed as far as he could go from the fray, eyes fixed on the bloody stalemate that was now seething at the edge of the pit. No danger there.
Now. His hands tightened on the Shadow Box, that had been so hard to come by. He needed power for this, strength beyond his own, strength from a time when men like him were truly strong.
Laetrimae, come forth, he commanded. Come forth to serve me.
She boiled into the air, a writhing smudge of thorns and briars within which hung her human form, pierced and crucified. The eyes she turned on him were a faceted glitter shining with her dispassionate loathing.
‘Kill him,’ Uctebri commanded, not needing to say who. ‘Give me his strength.’
The strength of an Emperor, he sought. Alvdan might underneath it all be simply a mortal man, a ruler merely by accident of birth, but such symbols carried power within magic. The strength of an Emperor could bind an empire; the strength of a brother could bind a sister.
Laetrimae lurched forwards, flickering in the dim air, but Alvdan saw none of it. His hands were locked on to the arms of his throne, as he pressed back into the seat. He stared at Tisamon and, from the midst of the throng, from the eye of that blade-storm, Tisamon stared back at him.
Uctebri saw Laetrimae raise her own mantis claw, composed of steel and chitined flesh. He gripped the Box so tight he felt his nails grind against it.
Tynisa threw herself forwards, crying out, but was heard by nobody, not even Tisamon. They were flagging now, those two fighters. The weight of the Wasps was crushing them. Felise had a bloody wound at the side of her head that had closed one eye. Her hands were steeped in gore up to the elbows, her thumbs constantly stabbing and cutting. Tisamon took a sword-thrust in the side, and Tynisa saw the shock of it wash over his face without leaving a mark. He was shouting now, but no clear words emerged, just a scream that sounded almost triumphant. The Wasps were steadily burying them.
Tynisa cried out again, feeling the physical shock as one desperate Wasp rammed a spear home into Felise’s back. The Dragonfly woman arched backwards, but without the reach to find her tormentor. A sting-shot seared past her, to punch a soldier on the far side of the fight off the wall and hurl him into the pit. Felise drove her thumbs into a soldier’s eyes.
Tynisa kept straining forwards, reaching with manacled hands as though she could somehow stop what was happening and wrench it all to a halt. She watched Felise double over a sword suddenly forced under her ribs. The faces of the Wasps were terrible to behold: exhibiting not hate or rage but sheer heroic courage in giving their lives to keep these monsters away from their Emperor.
Felise was by now on her knees and Tisamon fell alongside her, another sweep of his claw killing the closest assailant cleanly and driving the others back momentarily. He had his other arm about the Dragonfly, though his offhand was a ruin. She was leaning into him limply, and Tynisa knew that she was dead.
A Wasp lunged forward with a spear and Tisamon rose up to meet it, taking the point past his left shoulder and snapping out his claw to pierce the wielder’s neck. He was laughing, she saw. He was weeping.
Alvdan contorted in his seat as Laetrimae drove her claw right through the wooden back of it and continued on, until the smudge of its grey tip had torn out of his chest. Uctebri saw the Emperor’s mouth gape in silent horror, so wide that it seemed his jaw would snap. Then he was lost amid a tide of writhing thorns and insect limbs. Uctebri saw the Mantis woman’s face dip down to feast, beautiful even when disfigured by scalpel-sharp mandibles.
He took out his knife and held it poised above the box. It was not a special knife, possessing no golden hilt, unadorned by jewels or silver inscriptions on the blade, but he had no need of a magical knife, he knew, for the holder of the Shadow Box was magic in his very being.
Give him to me, he commanded, and the blood began to well – not across the unmarked yet spasming body of Alvdan, but along the length of Uctebri’s dagger. At first a drip, then a running red trickle, and then it had become a stream coursing down the blade and spattering the box, saturating Uctebri’s robes beneath. For his kinden, the blood was all things.
He brought the impossibly flowing blade up to his mouth, let his tongue taste an Emperor’s blood. Then he held it out to Seda. His red eyes transfixed her.
‘Taste it,’ he said.
She stared at him, almost grinning, but shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Immortality,’ he hissed. ‘You cannot tell me you don’t believe in magic.’
‘Oh, I believe,’ she told him. ‘I believe in what you could do to me.’
‘Taste it, you little fool!’ he spat at her, the blood from the knife flowing down his arm, pattering on to the floor. Seda’s face twisted with an emotion even all her years of dissembling could not conceal and with a scream she struck the weapon from his hand.