‘I hold your city in the palm of my hand, Maker. Give up Thalric, now, or the history of your kinden in the Lowlands will be a book of torment.’
A terrible, harsh expression came over the Beetle’s face, even as she shook her head. She took Thalric’s arm in exactly the possessive manner that the Empress herself might have used, in claiming some thing she owned, and for the last time she said, ‘No.’
‘Thalric. .?’ And Seda saw him shake her head, and the words came spitting from her mouth: ‘For this? When I’m ready to forgive you, to welcome you back, you turn to this? This, stunted, dark, ugly creature, instead of me?’ And she realized that fate would have her after all, for surely all the legends sang the same song, and what else should two rival sisters come to blows over but this.
A rage welled up inside Seda, not merely the inherent temper of her kinden but the fury of a magician thwarted, and in that instant she had all her strength at her fingertips, and had ripped up everything left of Argastos too, holding it above her like a boulder, desperately reaching for her self-control before she-
The words came from her mouth unwanted, as though reading from a script: ‘He’s mine!’
And she released it all, a monstrous, bludgeoning expenditure of power hammering down upon Maker and all around her, screaming as she did so.
And she felt the ground crack beneath them — not the earthen barrow floor, but what lay beneath.
She had time for one brief, despairing thought: The Seal! The Seal of the Worm! And then the darkness rose up with many mouths, and swallowed them.
Forty-One
‘There are two hundred and seventeen of them, sir. The rest are either dead or scattered throughout the city, hiding or holding out.’
‘And her?’ No need for General Tynan to qualify that, for he had made his liaisons no secret. Everyone in the Second Army knew whose company their general had sought out on the road to Collegium.
‘Not yet, sir. She evades us, still.’ The watch officer was standing with his back to the prisoners, all two hundred and seventeen of them. Many were wounded, and all were bound firmly and on their knees, out here under Collegium’s morning sky in some square boasting the jagged stonework and broken metal of what had once been a fountain before the bombs fell.
To Tynan’s eyes, how unsuited they looked to be soldiers! All so young and so delicate, handsome where their wounds hadn’t marred them and proud still, despite it all. Even when defeated. Even when captured and lined up for execution.
‘General.’ It was Vrakir’s voice, which Tynan had begun to loathe.
These men and women — yes, women! — had recently fought alongside his own. Spider sailors had brought his army food after the Collegiate pilots had made his airships their playthings. Spider troops had taken the brunt of the Felyal when they attacked, exposing themselves to the blades of their greatest enemies to give their Wasp allies time to regroup. They had stormed the wall using only their climbing Art. Their spilled blood had brought him here, as much as that of his own soldiers.
‘General, it seems appropriate that a sufficiently public spectacle be made of this,’ Vrakir murmured. ‘Crossed pikes along the walls, perhaps. After all, they betrayed the Empress, did they not?’
‘Did they?’ Tynan stared at him, stony-faced.
‘Do you doubt it?’ The Red Watch officer looked unmoved.
If Cherten were here, he would agree with him. He would tell me to do the right thing, the Imperial thing. But Cherten had got himself killed by a student, somehow, in an unforgivable lapse of discipline. I had not thought the time would come when I would lament the lack of Colonel Cherten, but I would he were here to do this business instead of me.
‘They are soldiers,’ Tynan stated. ‘We owe it to them to give them a soldier’s death.’
‘A traitor’s death, General-’ Vrakir stated, moving in too close, and Tynan smashed him across the mouth, backhanding him into the wall.
He was onto the younger man instantly, a solid punch driving Vrakir to the ground and then hooking his boot into the man’s stomach. And though the banded armour had taken the brunt, the Red Watch man skidded five feet across the ground, rolling and coming up on one knee, hand out and palm open.
Tynan was just the same, ready to sting, and for a moment the two of them were frozen in place, before the horrified stares of the soldiers.
‘Do it, or stand down,’ Tynan growled, and Vrakir bared his teeth, but lowered his hand.
‘The Empress will know of this,’ he hissed.
‘Take Captain Vrakir somewhere he can calm down and perhaps remember that most officers who threaten a superior get a pair of pikes for their own personal use,’ Tynan spat. His gaze swept around to the ranks of defeated Spider-kinden.
This is where I free them, isn’t it? Exile them from the city, tell them never to go near the Empire again, and everyone keeps quiet, a conspiracy of mercy, and the Empress never knows. But orders were orders, and the Empress had left him no leeway. And she would get to know, he had no doubt of it.
‘Have them shot, quick and clean,’ he ordered the watch officer. ‘They’ve earned that much.’
He stalked away, and heard the killing start.
There was a counting house, or something similar, that Cherten had commandeered for interrogations, and the engineers had removed all the paperwork and the remaining money from the cellars and converted them to holding cells, probably without being asked to, just standard work for junior artificers wherever the Empire established itself even for a short while. Tynan had some business there now, left over from the previous night. Another loose end that Cherten should be picking up. He found that he did not feel particularly upset that the intelligencer had met his end, but it was undeniably inconvenient.
The interrogators were not at work — it would clearly take them a while to get back to routine without Cherten — and Tynan found he had the place to himself, his footsteps echoing back from the stripped walls.
Probably I should keep a bodyguard about me, he considered. The situation remains fluid, after all, and you never know who might choose to have a go.
He glanced about the counting house’s interior, and reflected that he might almost welcome an assassin just about now.
But some great traditions could simply not be relied on these days.
He descended to the cellar, firing up a chemical lantern on the way, and casting a spitting white light ahead of him. Word had reached him just around dawn: there had indeed been an assassin, just not a very good one.
She was now the sole resident, hunched in the corner of the furthest cell as though driven there by the intrusion of the light. The artificers’ work allowed her no privacy: just a set of bars cordoning off one corner of the cellar, padlocked to eyebolts set in the stone walls on either side.
She was not a Spider, as he had been told, but a halfbreed with a lot of Ant blood in her as well, pale of skin and with dartlike blemishes on cheeks and forehead. She had been caught sneaking across the rooftops by sentries from the Airborne, whereupon she had apparently put up a fierce struggle to defend herself. She had injured two men before they got her sword off her, and they had not been gentle in subsequently expressing their grievances. He could see where her left hand had been stamped on, swollen and ugly, and the surgeon had merely knotted a strip of cloth over her bloodied right eye after cleaning out the wound.
When the soldiers had taken her down, she had called out Tynan’s name, they claimed. That was the only reason she still lived: because it was personal.