Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

‘The Masters,’ he got out. ‘The Masters…’

‘There are no Masters,’ Amnon said firmly. He put a lot of conviction into those words, and indeed Praeda had talked with him repeatedly about the archaic beliefs of the Khanaphir. Most of the time, Amnon came across as quite the rationalist Beetle-kinden, interested in machinery and progress and better ways of doing things. She knew him well, though, and there were times when his mind still played host to the superstitions of his upbringing.

‘You are wrong!’ Ethmet hissed. ‘You saw them sweep the Scorpions from the city, at the last.’

‘At the last?’ Amnon demanded hotly. ‘Old man, you had better hope that there are no Masters, for if there are, what manner of creature are they to let their servants suffer so, to see so many of their people die, to see their own army defeated, if all along they possessed such power?’

Amnon obviously expected Ethmet to rally at this, to curse him for his blasphemy, but the old man’s shoulders kept shaking, and his words were momentarily lost as he fought to control himself.

‘I believe in the Masters,’ Ethmet forced out at last, ‘and I believe I have always done their will as best I could. But it is for me as a man hearing the echo of a voice from distant rooms, so perhaps I have not always understood. Perhaps, sometimes, I thought I heard them when they were silent, or they spoke and I did not listen. But. .. I believe in the Masters now. They are awake. They speak, and if I myself can hear only the faintest whisper of their words, she hears them clear, whether she knows it or not. Oh, I knelt, Amnon. I knelt because the Masters told us to, all of us. It was only the echo of an echo, but I have never heard them clearer. I could not have kept a straight leg if I had wished to. She is here because of the Masters, Amnon. She means more to the Masters than do I and all my ancestors together for five hundred years.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Amnon admitted. He glanced at Praeda, who put a hand on his arm, trying to comfort him.

Ethmet was crying quietly again. ‘We have served them all this time. We have done what we thought the Masters… the Masters… what they wanted. We have failed them. We have grown away from them, from generation to generation. We are not fit tools for them, and so they reach out to others: first that Collegium girl, and now the Empress of all the Wasps. Even these foreigners are more beloved of the Masters than we are.’

Amnon and Praeda exchanged uncomfortable looks, on seeing the First Minister of the Khanaphir so comprehensively undone. In Praeda’s mind, though, a phrase resurfaced. ‘That Collegium girl’… Che?

That morning, in her mirror, she had seemed to see another face. She was Seda the First, Empress of the Wasps, a countenance revered and reproduced across the Empire, and yet, for a moment, her pale, fine features had been overlaid by those of a Beetle woman, of all things: a serious-looking girl of close to her own age. Seda had locked eyes with that phantom until it had faded.

It was not the first time, either. She knew the same face from fragmentary dreams, briefly glimpsed in standing water or reflected in glass. Most of the time the face itself went unseen, though, for her own mind’s eye sat behind it and stared out…

Seda had stood on the city’s western walls, those parts that had not been tested by the Imperial ordnance brought against them by the Many of Nem, and watched the Empire’s punitive force set off. It was expected of her, for all that she understood very little of it. It reminded her of that strange little meeting in the Scriptora: the colonel of Engineers, the two disgraced artificers and the Iron Glove’s halfbreed, all talking so knowledgeably about things that she could not understand. Not one of them had guessed at her ignorance or, if they had, they had assumed it was the simple lack of knowledge fitting for someone Apt but untrained. In reality they might as well have been making animal noises when they spoke of their craft, but she had been well briefed. She did not need to know how their machines worked. She only needed to know the result. They might claim to have an engine that would tear down a wall, but all that mattered to her was that the wall fell. She relied on people such as Gjegevey to brief her.

She knew, for example, that an observer from a more mechanically minded city than Khanaphes might wonder about the large quantity of machinery that this punitive force was taking into the desert with it: machinery that would seem to serve little martial purpose. However, once away from the city walls, any such observer would be advised to keep his or her distance.

And it was not all lies, either. Certainly the Scorpion-kinden were in for a rude awakening in the near future, for any tribe of the Many of Nem luckless enough to get within sight of this expedition would be wiped out. There would be Scorpion heads aplenty to satisfy the Khanaphir. After all, we are here as friends, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy.

So now Majors Angved and Varsec had departed, off to undertake their incomprehensible task in the desert: their peculiar mechanical mining for this mineral oil that the artificers had been so impressed with. So much for the Empire’s formal purpose in coming to this place.

She was left here as an honoured guest in the city, with enough well-trained soldiers to ensure that she could make the place an Imperial protectorate at any moment she chose. No doubt her people expected that, once having shown her face here, she would be back inside the airship and heading to the capital soon enough.

But she had another purpose, too. Gjegevey’s stories of the city had whetted it, but she had forged the idea for herself beforehand.

My dreams, she reflected, but that was not quite accurate. Better to say ‘ the dreams’, because, for all that she had woken from them, they came from another’s mind entirely: the stone halls, the statues, the carvings, the darkness, the colossal tombs that were not tombs at all…

And the power, that naked, palpable power, it had called out to her across all the miles, until she had woken three nights running with the name ‘Khanaphes’ on her lips. And now she was here, and this mundane city was hers, but beneath her was a power unmastered and ancient.

Waiting…

Nights in Khanaphes were cool but not cold. The stone of the city seemed to have some secret treaty with the sun, holding back just sufficient of its daytime heat to stave off the dark’s chill. Outside the Imperial embassy, the vast star-pocked sky seemed to suck all warmth and light towards itself, untrammelled by cloud, the constellations seeming to loom impossibly close.

Seda stood in the Place of Foreigners, the ornamental square at the heart of the various embassies that the Khanaphir had put up for their foreign guests, a thousand years before, when their city had still been clinging to the skirts of greatness. The statues of the great powers of yesteryear regarded her and judged her impartially: Spider, Mantis, Moth, Woodlouse, and of them all perhaps only the Spider-kinden remained a power in this world. Her own people were not represented: when these stone faces were chiselled out with such exacting skill, the Wasp-kinden had been no more than savages. Even in her grandfather’s day they had been so. That they were now the greatest nation the world had ever seen made her proud of her people, of her bloodline. We were not born emperors and conquerors. We have earned the right to own the world. But my people know only half of the world, can see and touch only a part of the whole. How lucky for them, then, that I am here to provide a bridge to those invisible powers that they cannot guess at.

Overhead, the constellations drew pictures in the sky for her, patterns that the Moth-kinden had names for back when the Wasps had barely grasped the skill of metalwork, and perhaps those names had been coined here, originally, from the wisdom of the Masters of Khanaphes.