Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Seda stood perfectly still, watching a score or so of old men and women, the pick of the Ministers of Khanaphes, bow their heads to her.

Of course, my brother never set foot out of Capitas, she reflected. Where our father and grandfather flew with the armies, he buried himself in the Imperial palace for fear of encountering the hatred of his subjects. How different a man might he have been, had he been welcomed like this in Szar or Myna or Vesserett. And was that so unlikely? If any city wished to avoid the Imperial scourge, how better to do so than with such a complete display of supplication as this? The Khanaphir government’s public obeisance to her was a gesture to melt the heart of the harshest tyrant, and surely she was not the fear-ridden monster her brother had been.

Surely, surely? She knew what they said about her: her servants, her advisers, her generals. Those near to her had heard the rumours by now, for all that she had done her best to keep the knowledge contained: the Empress has strange tastes. Missing slaves caused no great comment, but there would inevitably be some palace steward who had done the relevant arithmetic to work out just how many were vanishing, and other servants of her private chambers who had to deal with the detritus…

But that is for a reason, she assured herself. It is not like my brother’s pointless cruelties. I need… And she did need, and she could feel that need within her even now, which would have to be slaked sooner rather than later.

Behind her, Gjegevey the Woodlouse was picking his way down the airship ramp, leaning heavily on his staff. He paused to see the Ministers in such submission.

‘Ah, remarkable,’ he murmured, and she knew from the faint unsteadiness in his voice that he, too, suspected it was more than diplomacy that had brought them to their knees.

‘Rise,’ Seda commanded. ‘The Empire thanks you for your reception, and it knows that you will have prepared suitable chambers for us.’

There were Khanaphir servants scurrying away even as she spoke, and she had no doubt that the city’s bounty would be laid bare for her by the time she reached the Imperial embassy, or wherever it was they chose to receive her. She tried to focus on the political and material matters in hand, while keeping at the back of her mind her very personal reasons for demanding to come here.

Still, some instinct she could not name had prompted her to touch the First Minister’s brow like that, and she would swear that, as she did so, she had heard a distant voice echo from out of the very earth itself, and it said: Kneel.

Kneel.

And Che awoke to see the first pale skies of dawn, her heart hammering in her chest as though she had been running, clutching at the very ground itself to remind herself of where she was.

They stopped briefly in Szar, just a night’s rest, while Varmen spoke to some Way Brothers about the road ahead. Che had not been happy about their guide going off on his own. It seemed easily possible to her that he could be going to meet with brigands, to arrange an ambush. She expected Thalric to dismiss this idea, given how well he and the other Wasp seemed to be getting along together. Even before she mentioned her fears, though, she found Thalric already setting out to keep an eye on the man.

‘And I thought you liked him,’ she accused him.

Thalric laughed bleakly. ‘Let’s just say I’ve lost faith in my ability to judge my own kinden.’

The Wayhouse had been vacant for several years during the tail end of the Imperial occupation, and inviting the Brothers back had been one of the first moves of the Szaren Bee-kinden. The Brothers themselves were all Lowlander Beetles, for the sect had originated in Collegium as a charitable organization providing board and lodging for poor travellers.

Small wonder the Empire didn’t approve of it, Che reflected. Sitting downstairs in the Wayhouse’s common room, she watched the Brothers curiously. It was not unknown for men and women with dubious pasts to seek the absolution of anonymity wearing the plain brown robes of a Way Brother – the title was used by both genders within the order. Certainly, several of the Brothers she could see looked as though they would know what to do in a fight, for all that their order was ostentatiously pacifist. She wondered about the nature of the individuals Varmen was meeting with upstairs, and hoped that Thalric would find a good vantage point from which to spy on them.

Szar itself had surprised her. She had already heard a certain amount about the place: ground under the Imperial boot for a decade and a half after the Empire had taken the Szaren queen into custody. She had heard a great deal more about the circumstances of the city’s liberation – a Wasp secret weapon had been triggered within the governor’s palace, wiping out thousands of soldiers, servants and slaves at a stroke, in an action now notorious wherever Szar was spoken of. She had expected to find the city wounded, half broken, grim and drab and as bitter as Myna. Instead the native Bee-kinden had since been working hard to reverse all those years of Imperial domination. Szar was becoming green. The local buildings were all low, little hexagonal cells, with far more investment in cellars than rooms above ground. Under the Wasp rule that was all there had been, but now they were planting again, and each little dwelling had its garden border, each roof its bright bursts of transplanted foliage. This greenery made the whole city seem lighter and more spacious, and Che knew that the place’s true glory would reveal itself only with the spring.

Thalric returned shortly, with time only for a nod of reassurance before Varmen himself rejoined them.

‘We’ll be heading south of Maynes,’ their guide explained. ‘The Ant-kinden are worse than the Mynans – barely any time for their own allies, let alone strangers. Let alone Wasps, ’spe-cially.’

Che nodded. ‘And yet here you are posing as our guide, Varmen.’

He gave her a big, uncomplicated grin. ‘Trust me, you’ll be glad of my services.’

Heading west, they merged with a respectable number of travellers going between Szar and its Ant-kinden allies in Maynes, despite Varmen’s words. As soon as they turned off the Maynes road they were nearly alone, however, and making their own way across an unforgiving country, too uneven for agriculture and with patches of close-packed pine forest sending them miles out of their way. Once or twice, when stopping to camp, they saw the lights of other fires, but Varmen’s advice was to avoid them. Travellers heading west from the Three-city Alliance seldom welcomed company.

Each night, Che hung up her little ring of copper, but her dreams were intermittent. Often there was no spider, and finding one and trying to coax it into place yielded no results. When she did recall her dreams, though, they were always of Khanaphes: not the place of her memories, however, but a city that time and the Empire had caught up with.

She had wanted to broach the subject of her dreams with Thalric, but she was not sure how much he would understand. He had seen plenty of the old magic of Khanaphes during the time the two of them had spent among the tombs beneath the city, but what would he admit to now, months after? Aptitude divided them.

But tonight he turned to her even as she was stringing up the dream-catcher, and said, ‘What is it?’

She tried to look baffled, but the look he gave her in response was just exasperation. ‘Che, for a tenyear I ran agents for a living. You were twitchy when we were in Khanaphes, and you’ve been twitchy ever since, but since we left Myna something’s changed.’

Varmen cocked an uninterested eyebrow in their direction, then burrowed into his bedroll and turned over. He had already demonstrated a soldier’s ability to find sleep at a moment’s notice.