Heirs of the Blade (32 page)

‘There goes the future,’ Angved observed, holding up a bottle to the fading light. It was good Imperial brandy, and the label denoted a vintage that he had only heard of, never been able to afford. ‘If I were a more suspicious man, I’d think Colonel Lien was trying to poison us both with this.’ The bottle had been marked for the two majors’ personal attention.

Varsec smiled and shook his head. ‘
General
Lien hates the pair of us, as upstarts and troublemakers,’ he mused, ‘but he also knows full well that he needs us. Besides, the Empress knows our names, Angved. We can’t just be made to vanish so someone else takes credit for our work. And Lien knows that I could have written how the Aviation Corps shouldn’t be subject to the Engineers, but I was loyal enough not to. This is him saying that so long as we keep to our side of the deal, he’ll keep his,
Major
Angved.’

‘Why, thank you,
Major
Varsec.’ Angved plucked from his toolstrip something that had not been particularly intended for extracting corks from bottles, but which artificers had been using for that purpose for two generations. The brandy was darker than blood, rich and smoky on the tongue, burning at the back of the throat.

‘They’re training the new pilots,’ Varsec observed softly, once he had taken a first sip.

Angved remembered that other proposition to be found in Varsec’s little book, regarding the sort of man they would need at the controls of one of his revolutionary new fliers. ‘I didn’t think they’d go for it,’ he said, his tone hushed. ‘You’ve put yourself out of a job, you know. Didn’t you use to be an aviator yourself?’

‘For me, it was never the flying, just the fact of us having the machines. I’ll not miss it,’ Varsec replied, although there was a touch of regret in his voice. ‘Still, there will be plenty of jobs for the old batch of pilots – civilian roles, support roles. It’s just that for our new type of air combat, we need the new type of men.’

His proposals had shocked Angved, visionary to the point of lunacy. ‘It’s going to be a very different place by the time we get home.’

‘It was always going to be,’ Varsec said philosophically. ‘The only difference is that
we
will have made it so. The future, Angved – we’re making the future right here, you and I. Even if nobody remembers our names, and the historians jabber on about how General Lien and Empress Seda revolutionized the world, it will be us, only us, behind it all.’ He raised his bowl, and clinked it against Angved’s own. ‘The future,’ he repeated.

‘Our future,’ Angved agreed.

He sipped his brandy. Life was good.

Nineteen

She heard the footsteps. She was still awake past midnight, on this night of all nights. How had she known? There was no explaining it, but a premonition had needled her and jabbed her, and filled her stomach with sinking dread – a premonition that the end of her little world was coming.

She was Seda, youngest daughter of the Wasp Emperor, a child of eight years old.

The footsteps were in no hurry. There was shouting elsewhere in the palace, but the man, that death-handed man, idled down the corridor towards their door. She sat up in her bed. Distantly, someone was cursing. Distantly, there was weeping, fighting. Slave sounds usually, but somehow she knew that it was free men and women who now wept and fought, on this particular night.

She slipped out of her bed, shivering, her bare feet cold on the stone. It was always cold here, the sun’s fleeting warmth stolen away as quickly as it came, but there was a deeper cold now, and it came with those footsteps.

She knew who was approaching and what he intended. She knew what had happened: the terrible event that had hung in the balance for three days, and now was done.

Father?
But he was dead, of course. His death had brought the footsteps.

Eight years old and intelligent enough to know what had occurred, and what must follow. For a moment she considered the window, but she had no Art to climb or fly with.

Stripped of any options, she hunched down at her own bedside, hearing the footsteps stop at the door of her room.

In the bed across from hers, her brother Tarvec stirred, but slept on.

She retreated and retreated, but the only place to go was beneath the bed. When she had been very young, she had believed, after a vivid nightmare, that a creature dwelt there – red-eyed and its mouthparts honed into a long, hollow stiletto – waiting for her to sleep so that it could drink her blood. Now the space beneath the bed became her refuge, for the monsters were already abroad.

The door opened. There had been guards posted outside. Perhaps they still stood there, but they made no attempt to hinder the footsteps coming into the room.

Tap, tap, tap. Army-issue boots approached the side of her bed, and she pictured him staring at the thrown-back blanket. She tried not to breathe, tried to summon up some of the hiding Art that some of the lesser kinden practised.
Go away. There is nothing for you here.

Then he was crouching, and she could not but open her eyes and look into his face. It was not a bad face, in itself: a Wasp-kinden man with receding, greying hair. A soldier, like so many others. An officer. Her father’s friend.

But not today. She pressed herself back against the wall, as far from him as she could get, and jabbed an empty palm out towards him, as though she possessed the stinging Art that had made her people the greatest kinden in the world. She was only eight, though, and not so very precocious as all that. The intruder’s face merely twisted in dry humour.

She heard Tarvec stirring, sitting up, her brother asking, ‘Maxin, what—?’

Maxin’s face vanished from her view as he stood up, and she heard the sharp crackle of his sting, a truncated exclamation as Tarvec died.

Then Maxin was kneeling to peer at her again. Was he making a decision on his own, or recalling instructions given to him by that other brother, her eldest brother – the one about to assume the throne.

The Rekef officer stood up again and she heard his footsteps cross the room. She breathed a little easier, because now she remembered how the rest of the dream went. He would go and murder her other siblings, a second brother and two other sisters, so that, out of the Emperor Alvdan the First’s progeny, only the eldest boy and youngest girl would survive the night. Over the next tenday, eleven other Wasp-kinden – children or young men and women – would also die for the crime of having a mother whom the Emperor had found beguiling. Twenty-nine halfbreeds of various part-Wasp ancestries would follow them. Maxin was as thorough as the late Emperor had been lustful.

Then the third Emperor of the Wasps would take the throne, ushering in a new era.

She was so lost in this recollection that she almost failed to notice how the footsteps had not left the room. Maxin was standing at the doorway, and she knew he was looking back towards her.

A few hammering heartbeats before he moved again. He was coming
back.
But it hadn’t been like this. He had gone off about his bloody-handed business, she recalled. But now he had changed his mind? Not for General Maxin the restricting bonds of history. This time he would guarantee his new Emperor’s eternal reign by killing the only remaining threat to his power.

She was already screaming when he reached the bed, screaming as he dragged her out from under it, pushing her back towards the window with a hand about her throat. He was older now, with lines of cruelty and ambition written across his face which were the wages of eight years of service to the man he had made Emperor. He was just how she remembered him.

In the centre of the storm of terror wheeling about inside her head there remained one constant point, and she struggled for it like a swimmer in deep water.
Just how I remember you? But if you will be
that
man, then let us renew our old acquaintance, Maxin.

With a great effort, she cast off her eight-year-old self enough to find the fabric of the dream around her and wrench at it, using strength without finesse.
Give me visions, will you? Then I shall have some of my own.

The face of Maxin twisted and leered before her, and his grip was tight about her throat. With a fierce lunge of her will, she conjured hands on his shoulders, dragging him off her. In a moment she had squirmed from his grasp, watching the hated Rekef general hauled away by the two protectors that she had conjured from her own mind and pressed into service. Only one of them had been present for the real Maxin’s death, but it pleased her to have the two of them side by side: Thalric, her regent, and Brugan, her new Lord General of the Rekef.

For a moment she found herself fighting back and forth for control, sensing the dream world all around her try to suborn her new agents, to make the two newcomers a part of the same nightmare. But they were
new
, and reacting to the new was most definitely not the strong point of Khanaphes.

Thalric had arched General Maxin over with a knee in the small of the man’s back, thrusting his arms outwards so that Maxin could not sting. She saw Brugan’s knife glint just as it had when the real Maxin had met his end.

‘Hold,’ she commanded, because if this was to be her dream, she would rip all the joy she could from it. She approached the straining Maxin, with her palm held out, watching him physically diminish, from ogre to a wretched old man weeping for mercy.

She took a deep breath and summoned her Art, and then her hand was blazing, again and again, the bolts of golden fire striking Maxin over and over, searing and crisping the flesh of his face, smashing its way into his skull.

She recognized another trap here: she could become just as lost in hollow triumphs as she could in terrors. So, instead, she turned away, banished it all from her mind and faced her unseen audience.

Are you satisfied?
she asked the invisible watchers, and stepped out from the dream.

Che had a moment of clarity then, because she had been there herself: not with Maxin and the knife, but experiencing a horror that was personal to her. She had broken away from it, just as the Wasp Empress had done, which must mean . . .

And now she saw that well-remembered hall, high-ceilinged, with its pillars sculpted into surreal abominations blending the human and the insect. Braziers of blue-green fire leapt and guttered and, where Che herself had stood not so long ago, there was a single figure: Seda, supreme ruler of the Wasps.

An old man was curled up at her feet, and she knelt beside him, laying a hand on his shoulder and speaking softly until he twitched and cried out, as he escaped from whatever personal torment he also had been suffering. As with Che before her, Seda rescued her companion from the nightmares of the Masters of Khanaphes.

And Che heard the words in Seda’s mind, her private thoughts:
It is just as I remember it, from the dream.

A sense of dislocation paralysed her.
Who is dreaming, then? Was she with me all the way, when I came here before. Is she even now watching me watch her? When is this happening?

Only when Gjegevey was able to regain his feet did Seda even spare a glance for the grand figures that towered over her. Three of them had come there to put her to the test: two women and a man, their voluptuous figures naked and clad only in a thin curtain of glistening slime. Che knew them well, their kinden and as individuals. These were the ancient Slug-kinden whose hands had guided the other peoples of the world out of the darkness of barbarism, or so they claimed. They had raised their great city of Khanaphes to be a wonder of the world. They had lived through the long days of their power, before the records of any save perhaps the Moths, who remembered a great deal else they never spoke of. When the great Inapt powers – the Spiders and Mosquitos and Moth-kinden – were struggling for dominance in that long-ago world, the Masters of Khanaphes were already in decline, their city subsiding into history as they retreated from a drying earth and the harsh sun, into the refuge of these subterranean crypts. Whether or not they were once the great lords and patrons of the world as they claimed, was lost to time, but one thing Che was sure of: within their own domain they preserved much of the ancient magic of the Days of Lore, which elsewhere had fled before the coming of the modern world.

And Seda stared them in the eye. ‘Enough games,’ said the Empress of the Wasps.

Thalric gazed out over the irregular hills that had been cut into steps for agriculture long ago, and repaired every year by a chain of farmers, father to son, following traditions that had been ancient before the Wasp-kinden ever dreamt of Empire.

‘That’s it, then?’

‘Well, maps bicker, but just about,’ Varmen confirmed. They were in the Commonweal now: the sovereign realm of the Monarch of the Dragonflies, and no longer just the pirated Principalities that had become such a twisted hybrid of two hostile cultures.

Skelling had turned back now, his business done. He had simply moved the draught insect from one end of his boat to the other, and the barge was already out of sight, leaving Thalric here where he had wanted to go.

But that, of course, was not really true. It was Che who had wanted to get here. It had been her plan, entirely. Thalric had no fond memories of the Commonweal, and he rather suspected that it had none of him either.

At first Che had been so full of talk about rescuing her sister, and then later about magic, and even about the Empress – though that was a subject Thalric had no wish to dwell on. She had carried him along with her because she had possessed a purpose, whereas he had none of his own. And because he had grown fond of her, and because they had more in common than he had with either his kin or kinden. From the interrogation chambers of Myna to the tombs of Khanaphes, they had grown close.

He knelt beside her, trying to see some clue that would help him unravel her, but she remained a mystery. She had not woken again since after the attack on the barge. She barely seemed to breathe. He had no way to help her, or even to understand what was wrong.