Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Tynisa could only wonder at the way these Commonwealers seemed to have no fear of strangers bearing ill intent. Were there no assassins in Dragonfly-kinden history?

She was indeed no threat, or so she hoped. That cold rage had not touched her again since Siriell’s Town. Perhaps this equally cold winter had put it to sleep.

‘My lord.’ She tried something like their type of formal bowing, got it wrong, but Lowre Cean was not watching. Instead, he was cupping something in his hands with infinite concentration. She took a step forward to get a look at the things in the cages, and recoiled back to the doorway with a yelp. She had never seen anything like them.

They were tiny enough to fit into the palm of his hand, and they were manic, leaping and darting inside their little boxes as though furious at their captivity. They had two stick-thin legs ending in little clawed hands, and ragged paddles for arms – no, for wings, she realized, although they hardly seemed the right shape for taking to the air. Their little round heads had madly staring little round eyes and a beak like a tiny blunt dagger-blade, and their skin was furred with something a little like the scales of a moth’s wing. They had been quiet, but her approach had set them off into a twittering, piercing cacophony of sound, a random and tuneless assault on the ear.

The lean old Dragonfly in their midst turned and gave her a wry smile. He was actually holding one of the vile creatures in his hands, a thought that made Tynisa’s skin crawl. ‘Forgive me,’ she heard him say, over the racket. ‘I had forgotten how my little pets are an acquired taste. My family has always bred these little singers, and since the war I have begun to devote more of my time to our old fancy here.’ With infinite care he replaced his charge in one of the boxes and closed the grill, whereupon the little creature began yammering and twitching like all the others.

‘You are Prince-Major Lowre Cean?’ Tynisa began uncertainly. She had seen Felipe Shah eventually behaving like a prince, and Salma’s mother most certainly like a particularly arch princess. This man was not conforming to her expectations.

‘That is the curse I bear,’ he confirmed, washing his hands before removing his smock. Beneath it he wore a plain, pale robe, something even a servant would look drab in. ‘And you are the Lowlander? Fascinating.’

‘Please, master, why did you send for me?’ she asked. ‘How did you even know about me?’

‘Why magic, of course. Your coming was foretold centuries ago.’

She goggled at him in astonishment, and it was only after he had stepped out of the menagerie that she saw how a mischievous twinkle had entered his tired eyes.

‘Or perhaps it was a Fly-kinden messenger from Suon Ren bearing word from my old friend Felipe Shah,’ he added. ‘Shah believed that you might find yourself a little stranded here in Leose, so asked that I extend to you all hospitality due to an honoured ambassador from the Lowlands.’ For a man of his age he stood very straight, and despite his dress and circumstances she had a brief glimpse of the man he had been during the war. ‘If you wish it, that is.’

Tynisa thought again of Salme Alain, who would no doubt return home sooner or later. She thought of Gaved and Sef, whose resources were meagre and who would doubtless prefer to retain their privacy over the winter.

More than that, though, she thought of Felipe Shah, and of this old man now before her, two Dragonfly nobles whose war-wounds were borne on the inside, but who could still find charity for a stray Lowlander out of nowhere, penetrating all her angst and guilt and fretting about her purpose, she felt a moment’s sunlight touch her.

‘I wish it,’ she told Cean with profound gratitude.

The Empire had no great tradition of receiving ambassadors, yet these were not the first who had stood before Seda. They were the strangest, and most of her court did not know what to make of them. The great and good of the Wasp-kinden could not decide whether this was some kind of joke, or a calculated insult from an unknown power, on seeing these three cadaverous creatures standing before the throne.

The small proportion of her court who did understand what these visitors were, and what that signified, had gone quite still – like a cricket that spots the twitch of a mantis amongst the leaves. Those were themselves newcomers, a strange detritus of the Inapt that Seda had been quietly cultivating since she had secured her throne against the other would-be emperors who had begun carving off pieces of her rightful domain after her brother’s death. These other ambassadors – the Moth-kinden, the Grasshoppers, scholars and mystics and magi – stared at the three dark-robed creatures as though they were a nightmare come to life.

It was not just what they represented, that sparked such horror. Nor was it because these things were standing in the Empress’s court in broad daylight, whose true place was in the furthest, darkest holes away from the wrath of civilized peoples. It was a fear that these creatures might have a proposal for Seda: a promise of power that would be both greater and darker than those scraps of support that the Moth-kinden had been trying to get the Empress to accept. The price that would be exacted, in return for their gift of tainted power, threatened to undo centuries of bitter history.

The Mosquito-kinden had come to Capitas.

Seda watched them curiously. She had known only one of their kind before, although that one still cast a long shadow even after his death.

They had come to her in her dreams, these three. She was not sure whether they were scapegoat delegates forced by their fellows to undertake this task, or perhaps the boldest and most ambitious of a people sly and retiring by nature; or whether they were renegades cut off from their own kin and seizing on her unique position for a chance of reprieve. It was in dreams, however, that they had made themselves known, whispering promises of power, of understanding, even a twisted kind of comfort, extending a helping hand to draw her from the sea of blood that they knew she must be drowning in.

In her dreams they had been huge and cloaked in the night sky, their gaunt faces commanding. She had felt tiny before them.

Before her now, they were shorn of such grandeur: three haggard, pallid things, wrinkled and sexless. If it were not for those eyes, they would have seemed just some pack of ancient, mongrel beggars, not even worthy of the Slave Corps’ time. But their protuberant and glistening red eyes dominated their every expression with a naked, hungry gleam. One of them, too, had a patch of red across his brow, like a birthmark save that it seemed to shift fluidly as he glanced about the room in jerky motions.

There had been a war, she knew, for her adviser, Gjegevey, had told her that much. In some forgotten corner of the lost centuries, before her race had come into its own, the Moth-kinden, in their strength and wisdom, had broken the power of the Mosquitos, cast them down and saved the world from their thirst for blood and for dominion. Of course, as all the records were kept in their clever, grey-skinned hands, Seda had only their word for the rights and wrongs of it. As the Moths themselves were long since banished to a few mountain fastnesses by their own triumphant slaves, one might think the issue moot. Official Imperial history certainly did: the squabbles of the Inapt kinden in bygone days were not taught in Wasp schools.

She had surprised them, in the end, for as they had pillaged her dreams, whispering and promising, she had shown them only need and weakness, enticing them to creep from their haunts and converge on Capitas. Come to us, their voices had rustled in her mind. Be ours, sworn and sealed. How else will you ever control your new heritage?