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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.

‘You fool, you are bound to this! You have nothing but this!’ hissed Uctebri, but Seda was no longer even looking at him. She was abruptly retreating, staring past him.

He looked around instinctively. He could not, in that moment, help himself.

Out of the tangle of fighting Wasp soldiers a single figure had fought clear. It was drenched head to foot in blood, with one hand gone, a spear’s broken shaft jutting from its leg. Even as it burst forth, a soldier drove a sword into the apparition’s back and lost his grip on the slick hilt. The bloody, mangled thing was then free to hurl itself up the tiered seats, keening a battle-cry.

Your prey is already dead, Uctebri thought, seeing the drained corpse that had been Alvdan the Second, Emperor of all the Wasps. It was still his thought as Tisamon reached him with that fearsome claw drawn back.

For a split second Uctebri fought to assemble his magic to overwhelm the susceptible mind of the Mantis who had been his tool for so long. Tisamon’s mind was all pain and fury and ravaged love, so slippery with blood that the Mosquito struggled for purchase on it. For a second he had the man again in his power, but then something lanced through Uctebri’s leg, tearing his robe, laying his flesh open with dreadful pain from the calf downwards to pin his foot to the ground. He experienced a second’s horrified realization that the blade that now shed his precious blood was the dagger that Seda had knocked from his grasp – and that its new wielder was Tynisa.

Her hands gripping about the dagger hilt, Tynisa watched a Wasp soldier, his own face slashed open by Tisamon’s claw, slam his blade up to the hilt in Tisamon’s back, alongside the sword already lodged there, and Tisamon shuddered, crying out something, a word or a name. It could have been Felise.

The claw descended and Uctebri screamed, holding out the only thing he had left to defend himself.

Tisamon drove his blade into the Shadow Box, still howling that formless name, so that its wooden sides, with all their distorted carvings, flew apart like kindling, and for a moment there was a boiling, evaporating rip in Uctebri’s hands, but shrivelling and dying even as Tynisa watched it.

Uctebri heard the triumphant cry in his head, the voice of his slave Laetrimae, and of all of her kin, of the entire doomed place of the Darakyon, as the anchor that held them to the world was suddenly gone, the snarl in the world’s weave unravelling.

Tisamon’s claw buried itself deep in the Mosquito’s narrow chest, and the Sarcad’s own blood washed across the floor, to become lost in the stolen glory of the Emperor’s.

Thirty-One

She had seen the Bleakness go down.

Even as the corpse of the Starnest was settling on Solarno, the Wasp fliers had been attacking. They had been mad, then, almost jostling each other out of the air for a piece of him. Hawkmoth’s ugly, armoured vessel had turned back over the city but they had been putting bolts into him already, and Taki could do nothing. She had hung in the air, naked, unshelled, a poor Fly-kinden girl with nothing but a knife, watching the end of the most notorious pirate of the age.

In a flurry of yellow and black orthopters he had gone, the Bleakness thundering out over the Exalsee as if Hawkmoth was seeking to return to one of his island hideouts. The shrapnel throwers had shredded the air to either side of him, and at least two of the Wasp machines had been knocked out of the sky, spinning over and over on suddenly ragged wings before tumbling away. But there were a half-dozen others still strafing him, passing back and forth and pounding the Bleakness with everything they had.

She had watched the Bleakness begin its long dive towards the cold waters of the Exalsee, with the Wasps chasing it still.

And now she sat on the ground in the silence that followed, and wept.

It was not truly silence, since so much of the city had burnt, and some was burning still. There were a few knots of Wasps still holding out, in this quarter or that. To her it seemed a silence though, being without the sound of engines and the rush of the wind.

They had won, apparently.

Scobraan was dead, she knew. She had felt it in the way the handling of the Mayfly Prolonged had suddenly changed, known that within that metal and wood casing he was dead, his hands slack on the controls. The Creev was dead, and Hawkmoth too, he who had borne the Solarnese no love but had come to help them fight the greater enemy. Te Frenna, who had been more of a dandy than a duellist, was dead. With them had fallen dozens of others: Solarnese pilots, pirates of Chasme and the Exalsee, dragonfly-knights from Princep Exilla, and hundreds of citizens of Solarno who had turned out on to the streets to fight the Wasps.

Nero was dead, too. He would paint no more. Cesta, bloody-handed, a name feared and hated and courted, Cesta also was dead. She could not imagine a world without his loathsome shadow.

She did not weep for them, though she had cause. Her loss cut keener than even her own brother’s death had cut. Her Esca Volenti was gone, smashed on the streets of Solarno along with Axrad’s flier, and probably Axrad himself. There would be other orthopters, she knew, but never one like that, so perfect, so loyal. In the midst of so much death she wept, like a child for a lost mother, over a machine.

A footstep nearby made her look up, red-eyed. Niamedh crouched beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. Her Executrix had come unscathed through the fire, one of very few. Niamedh understood, though. Behind her stood the Dragonfly lord, Drevane Sae, leaning heavily on a staff with his leg splinted. His painted face was drawn and his expression grim. His mount, carefully nurtured from the egg as they all were, had been shot from beneath him. He also understood her grief.