She had sent one of her Red Watch to bring the last of the slaves to her chambers. The blood would help her think.
General Roder did as he was bidden, and even if thoughts of attacking this conspiracy of the Inapt crossed his mind twenty times before nightfall, he could never act on them. All too often he saw that armoured form when he glanced round, quite out of its expected place, until eventually he felt he was seeing it even when it was not there.
Then the old slave came for him, tracking him down amongst all the bustle of the camp, where Roder had tried to lose himself.
‘It is time, General,’ Gjegevey told him. ‘You will understand, now.’
Roder wondered if he would survive that understanding but, by then, dying with that knowledge seemed almost preferable to living without it.
‘Lead on, then.’ He glowered into that kindly old face, whose wrinkles no doubt hid sins that the Wasps did not even have names for.
Gjegevey began shuffling away, poling himself along with a staff, his old man’s pace unbearably slow to a man used to the fierce energy of a soldier’s stride.
‘You are, hm, suspicious, of course,’ Gjegevey’s voice drifted back to him. ‘There have been many changes in the Empire of late, I know. New machines, new institutions, a shift in the balance of power, the Rekef perhaps not what it once was, the Engineers more. .’
To hear that sort of sane and sensible talk, rather than a mystic’s babble, was something of a surprise, but Roder reminded himself that this old man had been a slave to the late Emperor, and to the Emperor before that, a tool long kept in Imperial service. No doubt he had talk suitable for all markets.
‘There were those in Capitas who doubted whose hand truly, hm, guided the Empire,’ the slave continued, not looking back at Roder.
Were. .? And yet there had been odd news from the capital of late. A spate of disappearances, certainly — and with the Rekef about that was not surprising, save that half the names had been men high up in the Rekef itself.
They were nearing the camp’s northern edge by now, and Roder keenly felt how exposed they were to anything that might have come creeping out of the forest that massed on the dark horizon.
‘Believe me in this, General,’ Gjegevey told him, slowing, ‘it is all to do with her. All of it is her. She moves us all.’ Almost a whisper, confidant to confidant.
There were figures up ahead, just a handful of them isolated beyond the bounds of the Eighth’s camp. In the poor light he identified them: Seda, of course, and her bodyguards, including that armoured form that made his skin crawl. A couple of the Red Watch stood at the group’s edge, and he saw the Moth woman was there too, and the traitor Wasp.
Is she mad? was all that Roder could think. That the Empress of all the Wasps, the most powerful, the most important woman in the world, was standing out here, prey for the first Mantis war band to come out of Nethyon, was inconceivable. Yet here she was, and he could not caution her or warn her, still less order her back to safety, as was surely his duty. A glance from her and his words of reproach were gone.
‘General, thank you for joining us,’ she acknowledged, a slight smile showing that she was well aware how little choice he had in the matter. ‘You know Gjegevey, of course, and perhaps you know Tegrec, the Tharen ambassador?’ This was the robed Wasp, once Imperial governor of Tharn and now employed as the Moth’s turncoat ambassador to his own people.
‘This is Yraea, also of Tharn.’ Seda indicated the Moth woman. ‘Gjegevey, perhaps some light?’
The old slave found an oil lamp on his person, and surprised Roder by flicking away at it with a steel lighter until the wick caught, rather than rubbing sticks together or however the Inapt might do it. The lamp itself, even just placed on the ground, was vastly reassuring. The darkness was still full of unseen assassins, but at least their imagined presence had been driven further away.
But then they arrived, stepping from that dark previously only peopled by Roder’s fears. He started away with a curse, hand coming up ready to sting, but a single gesture by Seda stopped him.
He knew them, these newcomers. His soldiers had felt their depredations ever since they came close to the cursed forest. The Nethyen Mantids had not been slow in taking advantage of every weakness in the Eighth’s security, so that Roder had been forced to make a new decision each day, weighing any progress against the lives he expected to lose. Their sporadic, savage raids on his forces had slowed him to a crawl, while all the scouts and Pioneers he could muster had netted but a fraction of the enemy. And here they were. The enemy.
He saw a half-dozen of them: Mantis men and women, tall and arrogant, with angular features and disdainful looks. They had come fully armed, with bows and spears, rapiers and claws, and they wore a mishmash of yesterday’s armour: scaled cuirasses, plates of chitin, moth-fur and the odd piece of fantastically wrought metal that was a match for anything the Empress’s mailed bodyguard wore.
Yraea the Moth went over to them straight away, and it was plain that she carried some weight with them. They at least paused to speak to her, though their arch expressions did not quite concede that she had power over them. Roder had heard how the Mantids used to be the Moths’ slaves, back when the world was young, but he guessed that time had rubbed the shine off that arrangement, judging from the way these warriors shuffled and glowered and stared at the Empress’s party.
Then the Moth woman was stepping aside — almost shouldered aside — and the Mantids were storming forwards. Roder tensed, and was not remotely reassured to find that the rest were bracing too — the Empress’s women bodyguards and Tegrec, even Gjegevey. Only the mailed form remained still, and Roder felt that it harboured a constant tension anyway, always just on the verge of violence.
From Seda’s manner, by contrast, she might be receiving a Beetle trade delegation in her throne room back at Capitas.
She opened her arms to the Mantids, displaying herself to them — and if her hands were spread to sting, well, amongst other kinden that was a gesture of friendship, was it not? If one of them jumped forwards with spear or rapier, then the Empire would be headless once again, and who knew what might follow?
Roder was almost physically holding himself back, ready at the first wrong move to leap forwards and fight for her, and well aware that he would be too slow, even so.
And they knelt. All six of them went down on one knee, heads bowed, weapons on the ground, the killing tension vanishing without any explanation. The Mantids abased themselves before the Empress of the Wasps, when they had barely spared a kind look for the Moth Yraea.
Roder stole a glance at the other faces gathered there. Surely they had all been expecting this? But he saw writ plain on that rabble of mystics’ faces that they had not. They had expected terms, treaties, negotiations that they themselves could have meddled with — not this abject surrender.
‘Rise,’ the Empress said to them, just as she had to Roder earlier. ‘Rise and speak.’
The foremost of the Mantids, a cord-lean woman, ageless and scarred, tried twice before she could utter a word. Her eyes were young, struck with a sort of adulation that Roder had never seen before, ‘You will bring it back,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘I will bring it all back, all that you once had,’ Seda told her gently. ‘Go and tell your people that their time is coming again. That I will do this thing, and none other, if they bind themselves to me.’
‘We shall,’ the Mantis woman whispered. ‘Empress, we shall.’
And they were padding off, the six of them stepping swiftly into the darkness, eager to spread the word, and Seda turned her smiling face on Roder and trapped him in the radiance of her regard.