Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

My grandfather Alvric unified the tribes and defeated our nearest neighbours, and he was great in one way. My father Alvdan the First built an empire, and was great in another. My poor brother’s failing was in never finding his own path to greatness, but living off the table scraps of our family history. I have my own road now. And she did, and her forebears would never have guessed at it.

From the shade of her rooms she stepped out on to a balcony, into the bright sunlight, looking down the tiered flanks of the palace, over Capitas the golden city. The sky above it teeming with Wasps and Flies engaged on her errands, the streets coursing with her subjects, warehouses crammed with her treasures, barracks thronging with her armies. Above and to either side of her balcony, several of those soldiers tensed as soon as she showed herself, instantly casting their gaze skywards, in case any of her loyal subjects should harbour conspiratorial designs. Wasp Art furnished its devotees with wings and hands that were deadly at a distance, and for the Empress to stand thus in the open would be a gift to any assassin, which perhaps explained the late Emperor’s reclusive habits.

But I know more than you ever did, Seda reflected, because castigating her dead brother was another source of amusement to her. She was slowly mastering her newfound skills, but the ability to read others and to know of danger, and to turn minds, all these were increasingly within her grasp. Last year an assassin had broken into her very bedchamber. She had talked to him all through the night, and when the guards eventually found him, he was ready to swear undying allegiance to the throne.

She had ordered the intruder skinned alive.

Her shadows moved with her, her constant guards. They were gifts from the Moth-kinden of Tharn, and she knew that her regular soldiers worried about exactly where their loyalties lay. Only Seda could see their hearts, however, and she had twisted them, and twisted them again, by gifts and words, promises and understandings, until the half-dozen Mantis-kinden killers were hers through and through, pledged inviolably to her by their ancient knots of honour. They carried bows and the short-bladed clawed glove that only the Mantids cared for, and any assassins that wished to try their luck would find the Empress’s bodyguards waiting.

She heard the shuffle of feet behind her, and sensed her Mantis-kinden escort tense for a moment. There were few allowed in her chambers unbidden, though, and once they recognized the Woodlouse-kinden, Gjegevey, they relaxed again. The old slave was her favourite adviser, and a supporter of hers since before the Emperor’s death; and if she had learned one lesson from her brother’s failures it was to reward loyal service. More than that, though, Gjegevey understood what she was, what she had become, and what she wanted.

‘I, ahm, understand all is in readiness.’ To the Wasps he was a bizarre spectacle, outlandishly tall and thin, yet so crook-backed that it seemed that he was meant to be taller still. His skin was a pallid greyish-white, with darker bands starting at his forehead and patterning the top of his bald head before disappearing down beneath his robes behind. He claimed to be older than the Empire itself, but his eyes were sharp in their nest of wrinkles. His people dwelt north and east of Wasp lands, she understood, in some steaming swamp-forest of eternally rotting trees, and his kinden were seldom seen. Once, he had been an agent for whatever nebulous leadership existed amongst his scholarly and retiring fellows, but time had eroded the particulars of his original briefing, so now he was hers entirely.

‘Khanaphes,’ she pronounced it carefully, ‘is known to your people, I am sure, in far greater detail than you have described it.’

‘Memory fails me…’ he said vaguely. ‘But perhaps the sight of it will stir some, ah, recollection in me. Without much, hmn, hope, it behoves me to sound my old note of caution once again, Majesty. There are other ways.’

‘We will exhaust them all in time, but why cast away this opportunity? The Empire has come to Khanaphes,’ she told him. ‘My artificers and officers tell me of diverse reasons why we must make the city ours. My soldiers walk its streets even now. You know what I must have, Gjegevey.’

He nodded unhappily, but she knew he would come with her and aid her, if only to retain some hope of influencing the future, of affecting what she might become.

‘Gjegevey, you shepherded me into this world, as much as ever Uctebri did. You opened my eyes to the old magics. You prepared the way that made me this… thing. ’ She saw the pain in his eyes, saw him about to remonstrate with her, but she pressed on. ‘What am I, slave? The ritual that killed my brother stripped me of my birthright, and gave me only rags to hide myself with. Am I to be content in that? The Mosquitos spoke truth in one thing: at the moment I am a beggar at the Moths’ table for what little they deign to share. I have been reborn into a new world, an ancient and terrible world. I therefore see all the things my people are blind to. Am I to be a slave in this new world and only play the empress, as Uctebri designed? Or am I to seize that world with both hands and sting it into submission? You know this, old slave.’

‘But Khanaphes…’ he whispered. ‘They are, hmm, ancient there, or were… perhaps the power is fled from that place, or perhaps. .. perhaps it remains too strong even now…’

‘You can’t have it both ways,’ she told him drily. ‘If they are strong, then I shall be bold and conquer their strength. If they are dead, I will turn over their tombs for what fragments they have left.’ Her face hardened. ‘But I know they are not dead.’

That was news to the old man. ‘Majesty…’

‘I dream, Gjegevey, I dream of lightless halls, of statues that wake and walk. Each night another page to the story. My dreams whisper the name “Khanaphes” to me, over and over. I am called there, as power calls to power. They made themselves the heart of the world in an age lost to my people, an age dim even to the Moths.’ She smiled. ‘And to your own folk, and their rotting libraries?’

‘We… remember,’ he said softly. There was once a time when Moths and Spiders called us brothers, mm? But never did the Masters of Khanaphes. My folk turned away from the world long before the, ah, Moths lost their domain to their slaves, and yet even at our greatest height, so the influence of, hmn, Khanaphes was already in decline. Its greatest golden days were behind it, even then. Old, Your Majesty. Old so that you, or even I, can barely, ah, comprehend. All that is left is the worn stub of what once was.’

‘I will be Empress,’ she told him flatly. ‘Empress of both worlds. The one I shall move with armies and machines, the other…’ She turned from the balcony at last, stepping back into shadow. ‘Do you not wish to walk the secret halls of Khanaphes, Gjegevey?’

His long face always provided a burlesque of melancholy, like a fantastical actor’s mask. ‘I fear I do not, hm, Majesty. But if you walk them, I shall be there beside you.’

The Wasp-kinden were a young race, but they had developed their own art forms nonetheless. Spider-kinden merchants making the long trek to Capitas were favourably impressed by the degree to which they had advanced the art of the pit-fight. Scorpion chieftains arriving with their strings of human goods admired the Wasps’ ability to control and manage so many slaves. Many foreigners of all kinden were struck by the delicacy and care with which the Wasps ordered and categorized their prisoners, although their unfavourable critiques were usually coloured by their own position on the wrong side of the bars.