Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

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.