What can I do? And he knew that the moment the Empress called, or even turned her attention his way, he could do nothing. And no officer or agent or assassin he might draw on would be any more proof against her charms than he.
‘Tonight,’ Gjegevey declared, as the three of them neared the general.
Roder started from his inward-turning thoughts. ‘What?’ He tried to make it a demand, but it came out almost as a plea for help.
‘She will make it clear to you tonight. All will be, mmn, understood.’ Behind the tall, crooked slave, the Moth and the robed Wasp watched Roder thoughtfully.
Roder knew full well that Seda had not so much as exchanged a word with Gjegevey — had barely even glanced his way since her arrival — and yet here was the old man relaying her words. Worse, Roder found within himself no doubt at all that these were the Empress’s intentions.
‘And in the intervening time you should perhaps consider which of your soldiers are best placed for fighting within, ahm, challenging terrain,’ Gjegevey suggested softly, his yellowed eyes flicking towards the forest. ‘You have, hmm, Pioneers, are they? A list of suitable individuals and squads would impress her.’
Roder confined himself to a curt military nod.
‘And you should withdraw your scouts from the forest edge all the, hm, way back to the camp.’
That was too much. ‘That would leave us open to Mantis attack,’ Roder snapped. And is that the plan? Is that what happened to the Fourth Army when the Felyal Mantids wiped them out, betrayed from within before they could ever be destroyed from without?
He thought he had broken away then — broken free of whatever madness had been quietly taking hold of the whole camp. He would call out for his men, and they would obey him. The traitors and lesser kinden surrounding the Empress he would put on crossed pikes, and she. . she herself would listen to him. He would reclaim her from their evil influence and save the Empire. .
Not for a moment did he think of actually turning on Seda herself. Later, thinking back, he wondered if that was what ultimately saved him.
There was a subtle shifting of the three of them, eyes focusing on something at his shoulder. Gjegevey himself just seemed resigned but the other two flinched away, and the woman — perhaps because she knew more than her Wasp convert — just kept backing off, as though the Eighth Army around her was safer company than what loomed behind the general.
Roder could not help himself. He turned to see.
It stood there, the Empress’s own monster: the hulk of Mantis mail that had made the Sarnesh scream. It was tall, faceless within the darkness of its helm, each plate of its enamelled mail forged into elegant spines and curves. One gauntlet was just of leather, with a short, curved blade projecting from the fingers, the infamous Mantis fighting claw. Not long ago, a slave had killed the Emperor with just such a weapon, and now the Empress’s very bodyguards carried them. For a moment Roder felt himself teetering on the brink of some chasm of revelation, but his mind could not stretch so far — his Aptitude pulling him back from the brink.
‘Tisamon,’ Gjegevey addressed it, ‘the general knows his duty.’ And even the old man’s voice, usually filled with mild assurance, sounded a little ragged.
There was no movement in the thing — it could have been a statue from some Mantis ruin — and yet every instinct in Roder’s mind shrieked: It’s going to kill me!
When he looked it in the visor and said, ‘I do,’ it was the hardest act in his career of war, but he was an Imperial general and he managed it. ‘Until tonight, then.’ And if his walk was brisk in departure, well, he was a busy man.
This could have been a fool’s errand. Empress Seda the First almost wished it had been.
This had begun because she had been hungry for a sort of power that mere armies and conquest could not bring her. She had been adopted as a scion of the old times, gifted with a magical strength she could still only use haphazardly, and she had simultaneously been given a rival whose strength was as great and who would surely come to destroy Seda if the Empress did not overpower her first. For the Beetle Cheerwell Maker is like me, at heart. The magic makes us so. If I cannot abide to see her face in the mirror, no more can she stand mine. Only one of us can prevaiclass="underline" the stronger sister shall live.
But the secrets of the old days had been ebbing from the world for five centuries now, and she had ransacked all the crumbling histories she could find for some leftover worth the seizing. The one remnant she had found that had seemed promising was whatever had been locked away after the old powers’ war with the Worm, whatever kinden that had truly been. The prospect had so alarmed Gjegevey that she had challenged him to find an alternative, whereupon he and the Tharen ambassador had cooked up this nonsense instead. Some fading shadow of old night locked up in the heart of these Mantis trees? A name: Argastos. And precious little more than the name.
She had humoured him because he had been her first friend, and this was his last chance to prove his usefulness before she cast him off. Besides, her brother had spent almost all his life inside the palace, and kept her there too, as his perennial victim. Now she could travel, and she did so. Let General Roder grumble: his soldiers saw her gracing their lives with her presence here, and they loved her for it.
When she had set off from Capitas, she had no great hopes regarding Gjegevey’s find. Instead she had decided to make the best of it: to place some of her people close to Roder, to inspire the Eighth, weathering the queasy voyage inside the airship that all her Apt subjects would find smooth sailing.
But last night. .
It was tempting to think of it as a dream, but that was her Apt past speaking. Something had come to her. Argastos? She could not know for sure, but something.
A shadow barely visible, but a shadow with nothing to cast it, standing in her bedchamber unsummoned. Tisamon had not reacted to it, but she had sensed its presence as a magical pressure as well as simply a trick of the light. A tall, straight shadow of a cloaked man, his silhouette bulked out by armour.
There you are.
The words had come unbidden to her mind, but that was a parlour trick that no longer impressed her.
‘Give me your name,’ she had challenged, and heard the ghost of faint laughter inside her head.
I have been calling for such a long time, and who could have thought that, when you finally came, you would be beautiful?
She had folded her arms. ‘I have better flatterers at court. Give me your name.’
When we meet, you shall know me. When you come to me, I promise you such gifts as you cannot imagine, little Wasp girl. But you must make haste. I have been too long without company.
She had felt some faint glamour clutching at her, trying to hook her with an enchantment that would skew her judgement, compromise her defences, but she had shaken it off with contempt. Even as she did so, the shadow had faded, its presence waning into an absence. The visitation was gone.
She cared nothing for this clumsy attempt to ensnare her, robbed of any chance of success by distance and by her own strength of will. It was confirmation, though, that whatever relic of the old days lingered between Etheryon and Nethyon was worth her pursuit. There had been power there sufficient to reach out to her even though she was travelling by machine, and surrounded by the Apt.
Mine, she had decided, then and there. Gjegevey proves his worth at last. And I will need to prove my strength if I am to master this thing on its own ground, Argastos or no. But a woman who had made herself Empress of the Wasps was not one to shrink before a challenge.