The Seal of the Worm (33 page)

What could she need so many slaves for? Most assumed there would be some elaborate entertainment once the war was done, though even the optimists murmured that surely victory was not so imminent as all that. Others wondered at the creation of some new all-Auxillian army to throw against the Lowlanders, some hundred-thousand-strong suicide detachment in a vast war of attrition.

Marent waded through the questions of his inferiors without deigning to engage, brushing them aside before returning to his troops. Against the fact of a general jaunting across half the world without orders, nobody bothered enquiring as to why he had brought a Captain-Auxillian of Engineers back with him.

Ernain had orders signed by Major Oski to seek out parts and mechanical supplies because that had always been a beloved dodge of the Engineers to enable them to go wherever they liked at a moment’s notice. He would have preferred having Oski at his side as he stepped onto the Capitas airfield, but the Second Army’s chief engineer was not as free to skip about the world as General Marent.

The Vesseretti Bee-kinden had been the Empire’s first major conquest. That meant that by now they were everywhere: Auxillian soldiers, house slaves, Consortium men, labourers. A sturdy-framed and hard-working people, with a good grasp of all the Apt world had to offer, they were valued by the Wasps for their skill and industry. They fetched high prices, and as soldiers were often promoted to the lower ranks. The Wasps had almost forgotten the savage struggle their grandfathers had gone through to subdue the Bee city.

The Vesseretti had not forgotten, though.

Ernain remembered finding his way to his home city during the reign of the traitor governors, when the whole Empire was teetering on the brink. There had been grand meetings, open demonstrations, stand-offs between the beleaguered Imperial garrison and the locals. It had then seemed as though the Bees would throw off their shackles and declare independence.

Ernain’s voice had been loud at those gatherings. He had argued against. Vesserett was not so very far from Capitas. Whether the Empress or her rivals prevailed, Ernain had seen clearly that his city would not be able to hold on to its freedom. It was too alone, too cut off. They were not ready.

Instead, the Vesseretti had put away their ambitions and stepped back from the battle line. The turmoil in the city had subsided, and it had been made plain to the Wasp governor that the Bees were – after some considerable thought on the matter – loyal.

That had been the moment Ernain had held his breath: would there be purges? Would the Rekef descend upon his people to punish them for what might have been?

But the governor had understood. He had seen, there and then, that the Bees could have torn down the black and gold flag, and that they had not done so. There were no reprisals. Indeed, after the Empress’s victory, in which Vesseretti Auxillian troops had played their part, a few new freedoms had crept into the city, for even slaves could be rewarded for their loyalty. Other city-states had made the same calculated decision, as Ernain was well aware.

The plan had arisen out of the ashes of that civil war. It was not Ernain’s plan, not quite, but he had contributed to it. It was the work of many hands, with more hands joining all the time.

In Capitas he presented himself at the house of a Consortium magnate, ostensibly in quest of missing deliveries. It was a flimsy enough ruse – for who would trouble a colonel over such things? – but there was a curious feel to Capitas just then. Great invisible wheels were turning, centred about the palace and the Empress. Nobody was inclined to question small matters such as this.

The man that Ernain met was an old Beetle-kinden, Auder Bellowern, the senior scion of that sprawling clan whose fingers were in just about everything the Consortium ever did. He was prosperously fat, his hair white and wispy against his dark skin. At his shoulder was his body servant, a Vesseretti girl less than half his age, whose company the man vastly preferred to that of his wife. The girl was Alysaine and she was Ernain’s introduction.

Around them, the magnate’s study was virtually choked with the collected trinkets of a lifetime of avaricious acquisition, a clutter matched in value only by the utter disorder of its display.

The Beetle looked him over, his face avuncular, his eyes all measurement and judgement. ‘You’re the fellow, then,’ he noted.

‘Sir.’

‘You don’t
look
completely mad. I’d expected you to come in foaming at the mouth and babbling Moth prophecies or something.’ At a gesture from the old man, Alysaine poured two bowls of wine. Ernain took his with a nod of thanks.

‘I wouldn’t have expected you to ask a madman into your home, sir.’

‘Nonetheless, you are quite mad, Captain. I’ve been let in on your plans to only a modest degree and I can still see that.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m sure you have a great deal of support from . . .’ Auder’s hand flicked towards Alysaine. ‘For her sake, I’ve listened. Bold plans without any visible means of execution. Even with the support of myself, or a dozen men like me, you cannot win because your plan does not address the heart of the matter.’ He nodded towards one of his windows, and Alysaine hurried to unshutter it. Auder Bellowern’s house commanded a good view of the palace.

‘Matters are in hand, sir. It is simply a matter of awaiting the right opportunity.’

The old Beetle snorted. ‘No plan ever worked that relied on waiting.’ He shook his head against Ernain’s attempted reply. ‘Oh, you pin your hopes on the Lowlands, but you’ve no guarantees. What if the Empire crushed them tomorrow? Where would your plan be then?’

‘Intact, sir,’ Ernain told him, ‘because the Empire will not change unless change is forced on it. What will all those generals do without an enemy? They will find a new one, or they will fall upon each other. Now we are ready to exploit it, the Empire will give us our opportunity.’

‘You plan for the long term, then?’

‘What other plans are worth making? You know enough, sir. If you passed my name to the Rekef, then you have sufficient information to have me racked and executed, though the plan would persist and prevail even so. Or perhaps you think this is worthy of your support.’

‘Of my support – and so of Consortium support,’ Auder murmured. He glanced at Alysaine, and Ernain caught a brief sliver of emotion alien to his lined face, a moment of genuine affection. ‘I’ll not put my name to anything, you can be sure. No Rekef interrogation rooms for me in my old age. If your moment arrives, though . . . if you make your move, well . . . the Consortium will do well out of your new world, I feel. We’ve chafed at the shackles of the throne as much as any slave, believe me. I wish you luck, Captain, I truly do. May we meet again when you have some more concrete achievement to report.’

In the light of his study, the lamps turned up high, General Brugan of the Rekef studied the latest reports.

Outside his window, the world was fading to twilight and, though he had ordered the shutters closed, still the darkness seemed to creep in around the edges, to steal into his room and hang heavy about him, as though his eyes were failing before their time.

He ordered the lamps turned up, but his servant assured him they were as high as they could go.

‘Bring me more lanterns,’ he croaked. ‘More light.’ To his own ears his voice sounded as his ghost might. How long had it been since he had spoken? His mind raised the spectre of General Reiner, a long-dead rival for power. The man had ruled his agents and spies in near silence, weaving a mystique about himself by his unspeaking presence, but Brugan knew that Reiner’s closed mouth had hidden only weakness. And when the man had died – Brugan had not even needed to kill him – all that fraudulent inscrutability had died with him.

Now Brugan found his own voice drying up because silence was preferable to disclosing any of the thoughts that sat rotting in his mind. Thoughts about the Empress. Thoughts about the nature of the world. Thoughts about his own death. Sometimes he imagined taking his own life, because that would at least be a decision he himself could make, an attempt to exert some vestige of control over the world, even in that one small way. But always he failed to turn such thoughts into execution, and recently he thought that it was not fear of personal extinction that stayed his hand, but a fear that
she
would somehow prevent him from carrying the business through – that, in his final moment of action, he would discover he was even less his own man than he had thought. As long as he did not attempt it, he could persuade himself that the attempt was possible. He did not want to discover that even death was no release.

At other times he thought that she would have him killed. He would look up, and every shadow would carry its knife. He would see her dark bodyguard, the pale Mantis called Tisamon, lurking in his sight, cold eyes fixed on him, and never know if
this
was the moment that the Empress tired of him. He had long since tired of himself. He was drained, traumatized. The Empress, their couplings, her rule over him, the failure of his coup: she had left him nothing of the strong man he had once been.

Sometimes he saw Tisamon, and the man was actually there. Sometimes the man was not there, but Brugan peopled the shadows with him anyway. ‘More light!’ he insisted, and his servants would run to light lanterns and candles for him, but the shadows only multiplied.

He stared at the reports, fighting against the encroaching darkness to read them. Here was matter that any Rekef officer should be gripped by: detailed movements of slaves, Auxillians, unauthorized meetings and journeys, gatherings of men who had no business being together save to plot treason.

His eye settled on one name: Captain-Auxillian Ernain of the Engineers, attached to the Second Army, but whose recent activities should be sounding the alarm even now, however much the man had tried to hide them. And that attempt at concealment was itself the action of a criminal or a traitor.

Brugan stared at the reports. He must act, of course. He must tell the Empress. He must send out his agents to have these people arrested and questioned.

But his hand shook, and the darkness only gathered closer about him, and he saw the gleam of Mantis steel in the corner of his eye, and he did nothing. He was lost in the night, and he could not find his way back to a place where any of his life made sense. He scanned the reports but saw only words, and the more he read, the less anything connected to anything. If the Empress could do those things he had seen her do, if she had become the impossible, then how could he trust any chain of logic? How could any of these suspicions bear the weight of his belief?

He swept the papers from his desk and called again for more light.

General Lien was lean and bald, and a man loyal to the Engineers first and foremost. His recent promotion, and the general advancement of his beloved corps, had bought his almost unquestioning support for the throne. He was one of the few who came promptly and gladly when called before the Empress.

Seda had caught him off guard, however. He had not expected to be quizzed on matters technical.

‘There are ways . . .’ he started, and then stopped again, and she could see him thinking the matter over as an artificer should, breaking down the problem into manageable pieces: the little cogs of mass destruction.

‘You have engines, surely?’ she prompted. She did not want to know the details, and indeed she could not have understood them if he had told her, but she wanted to know for sure that the Apt had advanced so far in this specialist field to be of use to her.

‘They could be devised, Majesty,’ Lien told her, and he was still elsewhere in his head, even in the presence of his Empress. He was a leader of engineers rather than a grimy-handed mechanic, but she had brought out the craft in him with her question. ‘What timescale . . .?’

‘
Now
, General,’ she told him. ‘Or very soon. I cannot wait for inventions and drawings and tests. Surely your engineers have something for me?’ She was thinking of all the work that lay ahead, the slaves, the cities, the unthinkable harvest that she must needs reap in order to reforge the Seal of the Worm.

At that, he looked up with a speculative expression.

‘Majesty,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘have you heard of the Bee-killer?’

Twenty-Two

‘Instructions are simple,’ Sperra confirmed. ‘Stay in your houses. No grand uprising.’

Poll Awlbreaker shook his head. ‘Makes no sense.’ He looked about the circle of his friends for support, the little band of revolutionaries gathered in the back room behind his workshop.

To Sartaea te Mosca it seemed there were few there as dedicated to action as he was. Raullo Mummers the artist shrugged unhappily, and the Spider, Metyssa, put a hand on Poll’s arm.

‘I’m not exactly keen about being penned up in your cellar for months at a time,’ she told him, ‘but taking to the streets will get messy.’

Poll stared at her. ‘It’ll be war. What were you expecting?’

‘I’m expecting the Sarnesh or someone to have a plan that won’t get everyone killed.’

‘Poll, have faith,’ said te Mosca. ‘And, believe me, I’ve seen the Empire close up recently, and things are as taut as a bowstring. The first sign of an uprising, and Tynan will give the order to shoot everyone who takes to the streets.’

‘And here you were saying he’s a reasonable man,’ Poll grumbled.

‘For what it’s worth, I think he is,’ she confirmed. ‘But he’s a reasonable Wasp with an
army
, and that would be the reasonable response to a mass revolt by the people he’s been set to watch over.’

Poll stood up abruptly, frustrated aggression making him clench his fists over and over, unable to be still. ‘Have you seen how many the Sarnesh have brought? It’s a joke, a glorified lorn detachment, a suicide detail! Even with the Vekken and that handful who’ve supposedly sailed from Tsen, it’s not enough to take the city unless we rise up.’

‘By your own logic,’ Metyssa observed, ‘that means that, if we do, the Wasps can hold off the Ant-kinden with just a small force on the walls and turn most of their weapons against us. Is this that Apt logic you’re so proud of?’