Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

‘How you must hate us,’ she whispered timidly in Achaeos’s ear. He looked round at her, surprised.

‘I did not think. . you see this now as we see it. Lost glories and better days.’

The moth had picked out a mottled wall as its destination and was flying in narrowing, slowing circles as it readied itself to alight. She saw that the mottling was, in fact, the flat-folded wings of other moths and that the creature was intending to roost vertically. There was a ledge at the foot of the wall, and the insect found purchase close enough that Che was able to half-clamber, half-fall onto the solid stone. Achaeos helped her up as the insect clambered towards a higher resting place above them.

‘Will I even be able to get myself from room to room in your city?’ she asked him.

‘You are not the only earthbound guest who has come here. For visitors, there are places set aside close to the edge,’ he explained.

‘Close to the edge?’

‘Why of course,’ he told her, smiling. ‘Tharn is a city, not just this fac?ade. In building it we have delved all the way into the mountain.’

‘But. . the sun. .? How do you. .?’

‘The dark is no barrier for us. Nor is it for you,’ he reminded her.

Beneath the mountain, in that darkness that was not darkness, the mind played tricks. Although this circular room’s walls were picked out in subtle shades of grey, so that the inscriptions and carvings that twined across them were clear to her sight, her mind still knew that they were black as night, and never intended for her eyes. Her ears strained, and by straining, heard.

‘Achaeos,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I can hear music.’

‘It’s just the sixth hour.’ He had been pacing, seeming more nervous now within the halls of his people than he had been in the city of his enemies.

‘The sixth. . hour? I don’t understand.’ She heard it more clearly now, and it seemed as though, deep within the mountain, a chorus of high, sweet voices was singing words she could not quite disentangle.

He halted, turning towards her, a smile starting that had been lacking since they left sight of the open air. ‘But of course you cannot know. This is my home, so I think of its habits as my habits. Forgive me. Children of my people are given to choirs whose voices announce the changing of the hours. This is the hymn to the sixth hour of night. I remember singing it myself, when I was only seven or eight years. I still recall the words.’

‘It’s. . beautiful.’ And it was: beautiful and solemn, like all this place, and racked with sorrow. ‘But don’t you have clocks?’ She suspected even as she said it that they did not. No mechanisms, no devices, no artifice here. They were an alien people to her.

But Achaeos replied, ‘Of course we have clocks. Water clocks fed from the mountain rains which keep the best time we need, but we record the hours for many reasons, ritual and practical, and by these voices everyone may know how the night passes.’

‘I would assume most people would be asleep,’ said Che, and corrected herself even before he opened his mouth. ‘But of course not. Night is when your people are most busy.’ And he nodded.

‘That is why the Skryres will shortly hear us,’ he agreed. ‘I’d hoped to have more time to prepare our case, but they have already known that I was coming, and why, and with whom, so we must brave it out.’

‘These. . Skryres.’ She stumbled over the unfamiliar word. ‘They lead you? They are your statesmen?’

‘More than that. I am a seer, and thus I have started on the road of knowledge. They are not near its end, for no one is, but they are so far along it that I cannot even imagine what they know: of men’s minds, of the universal truths, of the Art and the forces of the world. We are not ruled by the strongest or the richest, or those who can talk most smoothly. We are ruled instead by the wisest and the most terrible. Che, you must be careful not to offend them.’

But it is you who are afraid , she realized. She wanted to ask him what these Skryres might do if he failed to move them but, even as she stood up to go to him, a door opened seamlessly in one wall, carvings sliding into carvings, an age of history being devoured. A robed Moth-kinden stood there, older than Achaeos, though she could not judge by how much. His pale eyes narrowed when they saw her.

‘It is true then,’ the newcomer said in a hard, quiet voice. ‘You have been corrupted.’

‘That is not for you to judge,’ Achaeos told him sharply. ‘I will put my case before the Skryres.’

‘How fortunate,’ said the stranger, ‘since that is what they wish also. You are to come with me.’ His nose wrinkled at the thought. ‘Both of you.’

The capacity of Che’s vision could just encompass the room they were taken to, and then led to the centre of. In the heart of the mountain was an amphitheatre, stepping up and up in tiers, the steps themselves worn smooth and rounded by the councils of antiquity until at the very last it rose to terminate in high walls, disappearing out of sight into the lurking darkness. There were lamps up there, which surprised her at first: dim, pale lamps burning coldly blue and shedding only the faintest of pale radiance.

The seats were burdened with the Moth-kinden, for in the room sat several hundred of them at least, a crowd in Beetle terms but a multitude amongst this more reclusive people. They could not, she decided, all be the Skryres, yet they all looked alike to her, grey-skinned and white-eyed, all robed as Achaeos was, their heads close together as they whispered. She did not need to speculate on what had caught their imagination. Slim-fingered hands picked her out as she entered, pointing as they followed her progress across the floor. She saw blank eyes flash angrily, and sudden fierce gestures. The assembly of Moths stared down on her with loathing as cold as the lamps above them.

The fear that had already been quickening in Achaeos took hold of her now. She was in a strange place and she had somehow assumed that all these people would be like Achaeos or Doctor Nicrephos, the only Moths she had ever known. She knew that they disliked her race, so she had been ready for shouting, perhaps, or rough shoving, the way her own people would show hostility. Not this, though. Not this cool distaste lancing through her, as though she were nothing more than the insect itself, a grubby beetle crawling beneath their glare. She wanted to stretch out her hand for Achaeos, as the only comfort she could hope for, but he was beyond her reach, fighting his own monsters.

We were their slaves once , she thought helplessly. Before the revolution we sweated for them, built for them, smithed for them. They had clearly not forgotten. Here, beneath this massed gaze of contempt, she was nothing but a slave again, daughter of a lesser people, fit only for brute work or for their amusement.

It was the force of their attention and their Art, like a physical thing, compressing and limiting her to make her the thing they believed she should be. She looked back and forth across that unforgiving crowd for any relief.

They could have me killed right here and never care.

Then her gaze met a face whose eyes had pupils. There were soldiers there as well, a mere quartet of them to guard this angry host from the intolerable fact of her. They were neither help nor comfort though, for their arrogant looks held her in even less esteem. They were Mantis-kinden, dressed in pale armour of leather and metal. Their forearms were jagged with spines, and each bore the same gauntleted claw that Tisamon wore. If the order came then these would be the executioners. It was for these, then, that the lamps were lit. Mantis eyes were good but they could not manage the deepest of darknesses.