Heirs of the Blade (79 page)

The Empress herself had made her fondness for this establishment widely known, and the Beetle-kinden Consortium family who were behind it had been richly rewarded. It was well known, indeed, that after dark, when the museum was locked up, she would use its empty halls to speak to those who had particularly attracted her notice. It was, everyone knew, a sign of great favour.

Her companion tonight was one Major Karrec, a man of good family and good standing in the Consortium. As she paced the length of the Commonweal hall, the vacant helms of fallen nobles regarding her gravely from either side, he regaled her with stories of his war exploits and his cleverness in the face of the enemy. He was a man of middle height, running slightly to fat from a life far from rigorous, but there was a spark about him, she thought.
As there should be.

Behind the two of them, a pair of her Mantis-kinden bodyguards paced silently, the metal claws of their gauntlets folded back.

He smiled at her, did Karrec, and walked closer than was appropriate, and she realized that he was crossing that old familiar line, as she thought he might. As the Empress, on high, she was only female in the abstract, but if she allowed her underlings any familiarity, then some of them would begin to treat her as women had always been treated in the Empire: as something to be possessed and controlled.

As they reached the end of the hall, Karrec stopped and stared. He had been discoursing on some of the suits of mail, obviously familiar with the exhibits, but now he frowned. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, forgive me. I don’t recall a hall beyond this one.’

‘It is not for public viewing yet, Major,’ she said sweetly. ‘However, I have asked our curators to open it tonight, just for us.’

He was encouraged by that, she saw, and she wondered just how deluded he might be about his prospects. Still, it was all to her advantage, so she let him dream while he could.

The chamber beyond was small compared with the museum’s other halls, a simple box of a room that seemed as though it had been left to moulder for decades, until the walls had grown a patina of mould and lichen, the plaster decaying and falling away to turn the smooth surfaces into a maze of canyons and eroded topography, all of it made to shiver and move under the light of two ensconced torches. Karrec was not quite so oblivious as to take
that
sight in his stride, and he hesitated in the doorway, until she turned back and smiled at him.

‘A remarkable effect, yes? I understand the craftsmen laboured at it for days.’

‘But what is it for?’ he asked, entering cautiously.

‘This is the Mantis-kinden hall,’ she explained. ‘It is small, as there are few such in the Empire, but they possess a fascinating culture nonetheless.’

He glanced back at the two guards, who had stopped at the doorway. ‘And they’re friends to the throne now, I see.’

‘Oh, they were gifts from the clever Moth-kinden of Tharn,’ she explained. ‘Half a dozen Mantis-kinden warriors to guard me from enemies both within and without the Empire. As if I would take such a gift unquestioned. Spies, of course, for their masters in the mountains, their loyalty already pledged before they were sent to kneel to me. However, I have shown them where their true path lies, so they are mine now.’ As Karrec would surely question that, she took up a torch and brought it over to her prize exhibit, hearing his astonished gasp. As a Consortium man, and a man of independent wealth, Karrec was a collector. She took it on faith that he would already be placing an exorbitant price on what she was showing him.

It was a suit of armour, full mail from the closed helm down to the boots. The closest equivalent still in use would be the heavy Sentinel plate that was even now being retired from the Imperial armies, but this had been fashioned for Sentinels of another age. Every piece had been made with loving care, backed by centuries of skill. The elegant curves and lines recalled the Dragonfly mail in the previous room, but their message was far less one of idle beauty. There was deadliness written in every line and edge of it, so that the helm glowered down at them and – even hanging at rest – the metal held itself in such a way as to suggest it was a moment from leaping forward and striking them both down. The ruddy torch flame flickered over it, picking out the ancient greens and russets as various shades of black.

The colours alone betrayed the compromise she had been forced to make. There was no sizeable Mantis-kinden hold in the Empire, and the kinden themselves did not ever sell their antique heirlooms. This suit had been pieced together from a half-dozen incomplete sets that were loot from the Twelve-year War or from the fall of the Felyal, then commandeered by the throne from the collections of the wealthy. It had been the best that she could do, even with all the resources of the Empire behind her, but here it was: the closest to a complete suit of Mantis-kinden Sentinel plate that any non-Mantis had ever owned, and in truth she guessed that precious few of them remained even in the hands of their original creators.

She saw Karrec’s forehead wrinkle suddenly and he observed, with the absorption of the true collector, ‘It’s incomplete.’ His hand approached the empty steel cuff where the right gauntlet was missing, but he did not touch.

‘For now,’ she admitted, ‘though not for long.’ She moved about the room until her torchlight flared up at the object positioned to face the armour. She heard Karrec give a startled hiss, and saw him recoil with a palm directed at the effigy.

‘Remarkable, is it not?’ she asked.

They had taken it from the Felyal in its entirety, although by the time it had reached Capitas the rot had turned parts of it to wood dust, and her bodyguards had become restorers, splicing in fresh wood to maintain the icon’s form, without ever quite removing the rot that was part of its essence. Eight feet tall and brushing the ceiling, it was a pillar carved unevenly with insect sigils: centipede and woodlouse and beetle grub, all the creatures of rot and renewal. It was built with two arms, arching out and then down, but even then the resemblance to a mantis was rudimentary. It should have been a thing of clumsy ugliness that the people of Capitas would come and laugh at, deriding the superstitions of the primitives. Instead, in torchlight and darkness, it had the brooding, malign presence of a living thing.

Karrec had backed a few paces towards the door, forgetting that two of her guard were still stationed there. Then she moved her torch a little, and another armoured form was revealed beside the wooden effigy. She saw him relax for a moment, and then freeze motionless, as the figure moved smoothly forward: another of her bodyguard, and a fourth from the icon’s far side, padding into the gloom towards Karrec.

He was not, in the end, quite the fool he had been playing. ‘Majesty, if I have offended you in any way . . .’ he began desperately, but she silenced him with a gesture.

‘Your crimes are well known to me,’ she said flatly. ‘That the gold of the Empire sticks to your fingers before it reaches our treasury, this is no rare thing in a Consortium man. That you have underlings who rob and kill for you, to swell your private collection, this is but ambition and no great transgression. That you have correspondents in Helleron to whom you over-boldly speak of Imperial affairs, well, you know little enough. What could you betray, even if you tried? None of these mere errors warrant a death sentence, Major.’

He stared at her, his throat working but no sound coming out, and the two Mantis-kinden seized his arms.

‘But nevertheless you will die,’ she told him softly, once his hands were secure and he was unable to sting. ‘Not for any fault of yours, but because my grandfather, Alvric the Great, first Emperor of the Wasps, was a man of broad-spread appetites, and because of that he was your grandfather, too. The blood of Empire runs in your veins, and a cruel old man taught me well that it is a currency which commands respect.’

He was protesting now, but the Mantis-kinden hauled him over to the effigy and, while one held him still, the other took long nails and hammered them home, pinning his arms within the carved grip. His screams echoed the length of the empty museum, until they finally cut his throat and collected the first of his blood in a chalice, which she took from them.

‘The glove,’ she instructed them, and noticed their moment of hesitation. In shedding blood they were quick as water, but this . . . they did not know whether she was right or wrong in this, whether it was high honour or high treason she was about. Like most of their kind, they feared magic, even as their whole culture had been trained to revere the old days when magic had walked freely over the world – before the Apt revolution.

Still, after she had returned from Khanaphes with the invisible brand on her brow, the mark of the Masters, they had given themselves over to her, heart and soul.

One of them knelt before her, presenting the object she had called for: a battered leather gauntlet with a short, vicious blade jutting from between the second and third finger, connected to a metal bar the wearer would grip, able to flex its killing point in and out: now standing straight, now folded back. The archetypal Mantis weapon, lethal beyond swords in the hands of a master, laughable when wielded by the untrained. But she had seen what it could do. She had been given a detailed and graphic lesson on just what carnage a man could wreak with such a thing.

She nodded, and the Mantis-kinden secured the glove to the armour’s empty cuff. She put a hand on the elegantly spined pauldrons, feeling the emptiness, a vacancy that went beyond a simple, unoccupied suit of mail, as though the breastplate enclosed a vast lonely abyss, and in its depths . . .

She sipped from the chalice, tasting Karrec’s blood. His life of small cruelties and petty selfishness had given it a bitter flavour, but there was a rich aftertaste there, his unknown heritage that she had parsed out. It was not that the Imperial bloodline was special in some objective way that an artificer could discern through analysis in glassware and measurement, but so long as an emperor or empress held sway, commanded the terror and the adoration of a hundred thousand and more, as long as the citizens of the Empire
believed
that blood and destiny rode side by side, then the blood of emperors was a power and currency in the magical realm of symbols and significances. It was a trick the Commonwealers, too, had mastered an age before, and then forgotten.

Almost gently she touched the lower rim of the Mantis-crafted helm and tipped it back, the empty visor staring at the ceiling. With a smooth motion, she emptied the chalice of Karrec’s blood into the helm, hearing it gush down into the further reaches of the armour.

No words, at first. She reached out, still reinventing the discipline she practised moment to moment. Had anything such as this been attempted for five hundred years? She felt not. Something urged her on, though, some spirit of the magical traditions she had been unwillingly initiated into: the twisted darkness of the Mantis-kinden leaching from the shattered Shadow Box of the Darakyon, and the blood and hatred of the Mosquito-kinden from her late mentor Uctebri, combining in her now, funnelled into her until she became something quite new: a walker between two worlds, a thing from another age.

And far away, in a direction that had nothing to do with the compass, she felt him answer.

‘Come to me,’ she whispered into the blood-spattered helm. ‘Come now to me, great killer. I, Seda, call to you. I have your blade, your Weaponsmaster’s blade that is more a part of you than it is the smith’s art. I have your heritage embodied in this shell of steel and chitin. I have the blood of royalty for you to drink. Come to me, speak to me. Serve me.’

The armour moved and, despite herself, she took a quick step back. At first it was a subtle shifting of the plates that could have simply been the old metal settling on the stand, but then, and without any definite, identifiable motion, something about it had changed irrevocably, and it was no longer a lifeless object but a man standing, faceless behind the helm.

She was very aware of the blade, the same blade that had shed the blood of so many of her father’s soldiers, that had broken the Shadow Box and killed Uctebri, and condemned her to be what she was now.

‘Look upon me,’ she instructed it. ‘See what I am. I am the heir to the old ways. I am the successor to the Masters of Khanaphes. I am old magic’s envoy in the world.’

Its reply chilled her when it came, in a voice like the rustling of old leaves, the creaking of branches.

One of them. You are the second I have met, to bear that mark.

Something hard crystallized in Seda, a seed of anger and jealousy. ‘Do not fear that. It will not be for long. So, the Beetle girl has sought you also? Well, no matter. She is not so free with the blood of others as I am. She lacks the qualities to command one such as you. Serve me, Mantis-kinden. Tisamon of Felyal, I name you, Weaponsmaster, gladiator, slave and killer. Serve me, be mine.’

And why?
came that cold voice once again.

‘Because where else would you find a fit mistress for one such as you, save in me?’ she replied. ‘Because I shall let you fight, and I shall give you blood. Because you shall be the champion of an Empress, her executioner and her blade. But, more than this, you shall serve me for the same reason your living kin here also serve me.’

And what is that?

‘Because I shall bring them all back, those days that you yearn for, the elder days of magic. I am the immortal magician-queen of the Empire, and I shall remake the world in my image, the Apt and the Inapt both. Where your kind’s old masters, the Moth-kinden, have tried for five centuries to turn back the clock with spells and potions, I shall usher in a new age with armies and conquest. The Days of Lore will return, the days of darkness and fear, and I shall rule over them, and you shall be my right hand. Serve me.’

She watched and waited, and saw his blade quiver and flex. Eyes glittered suddenly in the empty night of the helm.

Tisamon nodded.

Glossary