The Fly-kinden milled and clustered, and slowed noticeably until the Wasps shouted at them to keep up. Severn Hill was Engineering Corps territory, and that raised an entirely different spectre: not execution or torture perhaps, but everyone knew the Engineers got through a steady supply of slaves in testing their inventions. Perhaps they had run short of slaves?
Severn Hill itself was a grand ziggurat, the outside bustling with a few hundred Wasp artificers who spared the straggling Fly-kinden not a glance. The air was loud with strange mechanisms, not the familiar patter of the looms, and the drone of flying machines was a constant background noise as they shuttled to and from a pair of nearby airfields.
‘In,’ snapped the lieutenant, and they entered the shadow of the ziggurat, were hustled down low-ceilinged corridors until they were disgorged into a square, windowless room over-lit by the rearing flames of gas lamps.
There was a man there, another Wasp but a strange-looking one, bearded like a Spider-kinden and with a slightly manic look in his eyes, and yet with a major’s badge at his collar. He regarded them from the far side of a vast desk, the top of which was entirely invisible beneath a clutter of papers.
‘As requested, Major Varsec,’ the lieutenant reported. ‘All the Consortium would spare us at this time. All factory artificers, and used to handling machines.’
The major regarded them coolly. ‘Do you think Captain Aarmon will take to them?’ he asked, smiling slightly.
Pingge saw the lieutenant twitch at the question, for all it was plainly rhetorical. Whoever ‘Captain Aarmon’ was, he was not well liked.
‘Take them to the new machines,’ Major Varsec ordered. ‘Let’s see who has the knack of it.’ He stood abruptly, looking them over as though they had become soldiers. ‘Your old work is done. They’ll manage without you. You’re in the Engineers now, and you’re mine.’
This audience chamber was much too grand just for waiting in. Abandoned there, General Tynan stood at near attention, suspecting eyes peering at him from every wall. He was deep within the palace, some part of it beyond the known haunt of soldiers, sycophants and foreign diplomats.
The walls were hung with tapestries showing interlacing Spider-kinden arabesques, gold and red and black, that did strange things to the eye. There was daylight from shafts in the ceiling and there was a flaring white glare from chemical burners on the walls, but the tapestries ate it all and smouldered sullenly, holding on to a darkness that the room should have been rid of. The rugs beneath his feet were from Vesserett, he guessed, woven bee-fur now slightly threadbare from too many marching boots. The furniture — a long table alongside one wall, and the single seat at the far end of the room — was local work but very fine, ornate black wood with gilded highlights, some slave craftsman’s masterpieces.
It put him off his stride: not a cell, but a long way from freedom. Where now for General Tynan of the inexorable Second Army?
There was the sound of bootsteps behind him, and he shifted to one side as another man was led in. They exchanged glances, reading a great deal into one another’s presence.
‘General Roder,’ Tynan noted, and the other man nodded.
Roder had been only a colonel when Tynan had last seen him, but then the Eighth had gone up against the Spider-kinden at Seldis, and a lucky assassin had attempted to throw it into disarray by killing its leader, a practice that the Imperial rank structure was there to blunt. He made a young general, did Roder, a solid, soldierly man more than ten years Tynan’s junior but showing every sign that he would be just as bald soon enough, his dark hair on the retreat from his forehead. The left side of his face was stiff and expressionless courtesy of a failed poisoning attempt.
We are two of a kind. Tynan did not need to say it. Roder had hauled the Eighth Army off the Spiders’ doorstep when the Emperor had died, just as the Second had come hotfoot from investing Collegium. They were both men who had missed out on their chance to be the great heroes, failing the Empire by serving their new Empress.
Roder gathered himself to say something, but at that point everyone else trooped in, judge and jury and all.
I could have asked for some of these faces to have fallen from favour during the infighting, Tynan considered, but there was a certain class of man who never seemed to misstep, clinging to power like a leech.
He knew General Brugan, of course, and would reluctantly admit that he was glad the Rekef had ended up in that man’s hands rather than those of either of his late rivals. Still, it was a rare army officer who had any love for the Rekef Inlander, and generals had as much — or more — to fear from a purge than common soldiers. Brugan, at least, could pass for a fighting man, still strong and fit even though he was greying. The lancing gaze of his piercing grey eyes was often all he needed to draw confessions from the fearful, and obedience from his underlings.
To his left was Colonel Vecter, who had served with Brugan in the East-Empire before the war: a deceptively scholarly looking man with neatly parted hair and spectacles, a skilled artificer who was a constant innovator of the interrogation machines. On Brugan’s right was Colonel Harvang, as though some magician had taken two whole men, swept some small quality of discipline one way to make Vecter, and then shovelled all the fat and sloth and idleness the other. In straining tunic, the gross colonel was chewing constantly at some piece of gristle, with some smug young major at his heels — to feed him sweetmeats, no doubt.
There were more: lean, bald Colonel Lien of the Engineers had stolen a general’s rank badge from somewhere, and was looking insufferably pleased about it, whilst Knowles Bellowern’s dark Beetle face held an expression of mild indifference, masking the fact that the Consortium colonel was one of the richest men in the Empire and head of a powerful and ambitious dynasty. Tynan looked on them all without love.
Well, at least we know where we are. But he was wrong about that. Despite the two former generals being faced with as imposing a clique of power-mongers as they had ever seen in one place before, everyone there was still waiting. There could be only one person able to bring these dignitaries together and force them to fidget and shuffle at her pleasure.
Tynan was ready for her when she swept into the room: the Empress Seda the First, whose throne he and Roder had saved by abandoning their respective campaigns, at her command. He had never actually met the woman before. His fall from grace had been too immediate, his army disbanded, his soldiers redeployed. He had thought it merely due to his failure, at the time. In retrospect he had realized that it was simple mistrust. A general with an army, in those turbulent days of secession and civil war, might have been just a little too tempted to try for the throne himself.
Seda was absurdly young — years younger than any of them, even than Harvang’s protege. A frail and slender girl, and as beautiful as nature’s gifts and Spider cosmetics could make her, and when she entered the room she held all their attention utterly captive. Tynan, older and wiser than most, saw from the corners of his eyes just how she affected them: Bellowern’s moistened lips, Vecter removing his spectacles to clean them, an unnameable, hungry expression nakedly apparent on General Brugan’s face. Harvang’s young follower started noticeably, flinching away the moment she entered the room.
She was slim and delicate, but her presence filled every inch of space there, forcing itself on them.
‘General Tynan,’ she acknowledged, and his name on her lips jolted something within him, despite himself. ‘General Roder.’ Her smile was painful to behold, like looking at the sun.
General Brugan cleared his throat. ‘It has so pleased Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First to summon you to her presence,’ he began, but the Empress had taken her seat by then, and now waved him to silence with a brief gesture. Tynan had heard many theories about the precise balance of power at court, and many of them claimed that Brugan, lord of the Rekef, held the reins, and that the Empress was his puppet.