Dragonfly Falling (13 page)

The Emperor was breaking
his fast in company today. Often he dined with concubines, sometimes generals
or advisers that he wished to favour. Once in a tenday, though, he made a point
of sending for his sister. She was installed in a palace of her own across the
city that was as much a padded prison as anything else. He knew that to arrive
here on time for a dawn breakfast she would be roused from her bed not long
after midnight. After all, the daughter of the Empire must be correctly dressed
and perfumed and painted.

As Emperor he took his
victories where he wanted, so here she was.

They sat at a table,
almost within reach of one another, and servants scuttled to serve them with
seedcakes and new-baked bread and warm honeydew. The city beyond was waking up,
a hundred dashes of glitter showing his subjects taking to the air. None of the
airborne would approach the palace, of course. There were guards enough on the
tier above them who would shoot any intruder without question.

And one more guard, of
course, to stand uncomfortably close behind his sister, to remind her of her
situation.

‘Your name came up in
council again,’ he remarked, sipping his honeydew. He seemed all ease here,
slouching in his chair, smiling at the servants. She, on the other hand, sat
with a spear-straight back, eating little and delicately. Eight years his
junior, barely a woman, she had been living in fear now for half her life.

‘General Maxin wishes, I
think, to be remembered to you.’

He was adept at reading
her. Now, seeing her lips tighten, he broadened his own smile.
There
was a name she was unlikely to forget. Three
brothers and a sister that had separated the two of them in age had all fallen,
if not to Maxin’s knife then to his orders.

‘I am sure,’ she said,
‘that I am grateful to the general for his concern.’

He laughed politely.
‘Dear sister Seda, they are all so anxious that you find some direction in your
life.’

‘I am touched.’ Seda
took a minute bite of seedcake, her eyes never leaving his hands, watching for
any signal to the guard hovering behind her. ‘Although I can guess at the
direction
they have in mind.’

‘They don’t understand
how it is between us,’ Alvdan continued. A servant brought him more bread and
buttered it for him.

‘I am not sure that I
do, Alvdan.’ She sensed the guard shift behind her and added, ‘Your Imperial
Majesty.’

‘They think I am so
soft-hearted. They agonize over it, that the Emperor of the Wasps should have
such a flaw in his character,’ he told her.

‘Then you are right that
they clearly do not understand you.’

‘Insolence, sister Seda,
does not become one of our line,’ he warned her.

She lowered her head but
her eyes stayed with his hands.

‘You and I understand
each other, do we not?’ he pressed.

‘We do . . . Your
Majesty.’

‘Tell me,’ he said. She
glanced up at him, and he repeated, ‘Tell me. I love to hear the words from
you.’

For a second she looked
rebellious, but it passed like the weather. ‘You hate and despise me, Majesty.
Your joy is in my misery.’

‘And an Emperor deserves
all joys in life, does he not,’ he agreed happily. ‘My advisers and their
plans! They do not understand your potential. Last year they were plotting to
marry you off, to make an honest wife of you. They do not realize that you are
not like other women of our race. You are no mere adornment for some
man
. You are a weapon, and if your hilt were in a man’s
hand he would turn your edge on me. I think General Maxin would marry you
himself, if I was mad enough to let him.’

She said something
quietly, and he rapped his knife-hilt on the table impatiently.

‘I said I would rather
die, Your Majesty,’ she answered him.

He smiled broadly at
that. ‘Well then perhaps I should hold the option open. I can always have Maxin
slain on his nuptial night. That would be a fit wedding present, no?’

‘Your Majesty forgets
who he most wishes to hurt,’ she said tiredly.

‘Perhaps. But now they
are trying to parcel you off to some order, so as to make an ascetic of you. As
though you could not be recalled from there, once my back was turned. And that
is the crux. Alive, you will always threaten me. Yet dead . . . My throne will
always require defending and, with your blood staining my hands, who can say
from where the next threat might come? So, alive and close you must stay,
little sister.’

‘You will keep me only
until the succession is secured, Majesty, and then you will have me killed.
Perhaps you will even wield the knife yourself, or break me in the
interrogation rooms.’

‘Do you tire of life,
Seda?’ he asked her.

She reached out for him,
then, but the cold steel of the guard’s sword touched her cheek before she
could touch even his fingers. With a long sigh she drew back.

‘I have had no life
since our father died. What I have had since then is nothing more than a long
descent, and every tenday the ground is moved one tenday further off, so that I
drop and drop. But one day the ground will stay where it is, and I shall be
dashed to pieces.’

‘Beautifully said,’ he
told her. ‘Your education has not been wasted after all. Seeing the good use
you have made of it, I decide that I shall broaden it.’

This was a change from
the usual routine. ‘Your Imperial Majesty?’ she enquired cautiously.

‘A little trip to the
dungeons, dear Seda,’ he said and, when she sighed, he added, ‘Not yet, dear
sister. It is not your turn yet. Instead there is a most interesting prisoner
that General Maxin has brought for me. I think you should see him. Furthermore,
I think he is desirous of seeing you.’

The Wasp Empire was all
about imposing order. Alvdan the Second’s grandfather Alvric had forced it on
his own people, who were a turbulent and savage lot by nature. The original
Alvdan, first of that name, had then turned his need for order on the wider
world and his namesake son had followed his lead. The imposition of order
became all. The multiplicity of ranks and stations within the army, the precise
status of the more powerful families, the honours and titles that were the gift
of the throne, even the station and privileges of individual slaves – everyone
had a place, and those above, and those below.

The maxim applied even
to prisoners. There had developed a whole imperial art to the treatment of
prisoners – how often they were fed; whether they had a cell a man could stand
in, or even lie straight in; whether they were kept damp, kept cold; whether
they were dragged out to lie on the artificer-interrogator’s mechanical tables
for no other reason than it was their turn, their lowly contribution to the
Empire’s sense of order.

Such prisoners as had
something to offer the Empire, they could do well for themselves. They could
even make the leap, eventually, from prisoner to slave – just as the threat of
becoming a prisoner kept the lowest slaves in line.

Judging by such exacting
standards, this man her brother had found must have a great deal of potential,
for his cell lay on the airiest level of Capitas’s most accommodating prison.
He had two rooms to himself, and an antechamber, and the guards even rattled
the barred door in advance to announce that he had visitors. In the antechamber
there sat three young pages, two boys and a girl, presumably to run errands for
the prisoner’s needs. As she considered that, Princess Seda noticed how pale
and drawn they all were, and that one was visibly trembling.

She was not really a
princess, of course. That was a Commonwealer title that one young officer,
desperately gallant and politically naïve, had once given her. What fate had
befallen him since she did not know, but he had been a brief ray of sun through
the clouds that perpetually clogged her life.

The prisoner’s reception
chamber was lit by great windows, latticed with metal bars, that extended
across almost an entire wall, and opened up part of the ceiling as well. There
were no curtains, she saw. The sun flooded unopposed across the floor until it
met the doorway into the sleeping chamber. That room was quite dark, muffled in
drapes, and impenetrable to her gaze.

‘Your Emperor is here,’
one of the guards announced. ‘Present yourself!’

For a moment it seemed
that nothing would happen, and then Seda heard a shuffling from within the
darkness, and at last a hooded figure in tattered robes came forward tentatively
to the brink of the dazzling light. One hand, pale as death and thin as bone,
was raised against the sun.

‘Come forward, we
command it,’ Alvdan instructed, and Seda saw how he was enjoying himself,
watching the wretch quail before the sunlight.

The guard began
uncoiling a whip from his belt and, with a shudder, the slender creature crept
forwards, head turned away from the windows. She could see nothing of him yet
but those two delicate hands, long-fingered and sharp-nailed.

‘We have brought our
sister to you, since we thought that you might be of interest to each other,’
Alvdan sounded pleased with himself no end. The cowl shifted and sought her
out, and she imagined watery eyes within were trying to focus on her.

‘Introduce yourself,
creature,’ Alvdan said. ‘Have your kinden no manners?’

The robed thing gave a
long, tired hiss and crept closer, until it was almost within arm’s reach.
There were blue veins prominent against the translucence of its arms, and
something about the creature sent a deep shiver through Seda.

‘This is Seda, youngest
of our father’s line, as we are oldest,’ Alvdan announced. ‘Name yourself.’

The voice was hoarse and
low. ‘Uctebri the Sarcad, Your Imperial Majesty and honoured lady.’ It was a
man’s voice, as accentless as though he had been born here in Capitas city.

‘And is it good-mannered
to conceal yourself behind a cowl?’ Alvdan demanded. ‘Surely my sister deserves
better than that? Come, unmask yourself, creature.’

The figure that called
itself Uctebri shuddered again, one hand gesturing vaguely towards the windows.
The voice murmured something that might have been a plea.

The crack of the guard’s
whip made Seda start. Uctebri flinched back from it, though it had not touched
him. She feared that, had the lash struck his wrist, it might have snapped his
hand off.

Trembling, those hands
now rose to draw back the cowl.

The sight was not so
bad, at first. An old man, or an ill one. A pale veiny head with a little lank
hair still clinging behind it. A thin, arched neck bagged with wrinkles. The
lips were withered, his nose pointed, and there was a florid bruise on his
forehead.

Shading them with both
hands, he painfully opened his eyes to stare at her. They were protuberant,
with irises of pure red, and they stared and stared at her face despite the
glaring daylight. Seeing those, she saw also that the mark on his brow was not
a bruise after all, but blood, a clot of blood constantly shifting beneath his
waxy skin.

‘I don’t understand,’
she said to her brother. ‘Who is this old man?’

‘Do you hear her,
Uctebri?’ Alvdan smirked, as though he and the withered thing were sharing some
joke at her expense. ‘Well even we were unsure when first we looked upon you.
Even with General Maxin’s urgings, we were slow to believe – and yet here you are.’

Uctebri’s head turned to
squint at him, and then his crimson attention focused back to her. He would
have been just some old man except for those eyes. They seemed to look through
her. She could feel the force of that crimson stare as a queasiness in her
stomach, an itch between her shoulder blades.

‘Touch her,’ Alvdan
commanded. Seda drew back at once, but the guard, the man who had spent all
morning at her shoulder, was now gripping her arms. Uctebri shuffled forwards,
those unnatural eyes craning up at her, and she saw his tongue pierce between
his lips, a sharp dart of red.

Something terrible was
about to happen. She could not account for the premonition but she began to
struggle as hard as she could, twisting and writhing in the soldier’s grip as the
old man approached her.

And then he was before
her and she saw his mouth open slightly, the teeth inside sharp and pointed
like yellow needles. One of those slender hands reached out to pincer her
wrist.

He was not strong, but
stronger than his frailty suggested nonetheless. She wrenched her hand from
that cool touch, and Uctebri said, ‘I must feel the blood, your great Majesty,’
in that same calm, low voice.

She heard the whisper of
Alvdan unsheathing his dagger, and then the cold steel at her throat. The old
man raised his hands urgently.

‘A point, the prick of a
pin only, Lord Majesty. Just for the savour of it. No more, not yet. All in
good time.’

They had surely all gone
mad. If there was any fraternal feeling in Alvdan’s heart she would have pleaded
with him. Instead she closed her eyes and turned her head away as he seized her
hand and cut across a finger.

Uctebri grasped eagerly
for the weapon, but Alvdan only presented the blade of it.

‘Have no ideas above
your station, creature,’ the Emperor said. ‘You know what you are. Now act as
you should.’

The crabbed old man
craned forwards, hands cupping beneath the stained blade to catch any drips,
and then licked the steel, his sharp tongue cleaning her blood from it in scant
moments. Even that small taste of her seemed to bring a new strength to him.
His next glance at her was nothing other than hungry.

‘Will she serve?’ Alvdan
demanded of him. ‘Or must we mount a hunt for more distant relations?’

Uctebri smiled slyly.
‘She shall more than serve, your worshipful Majesty. She is . . . perfect. A
most delicate savour.’