Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [269]
‘My agents report . . . The Empire has brought its armies to Myna. The war has started again. They are coming for us,’ his sombre gaze passed from Tynisa to Che. ‘Or for you.’
Epilogue
Capitas: some months before
Since the business with the Mosquito-kinden, the great and the good of Capitas had begun to look forward to the Empress Seda’s welcoming of new ambassadors. Whether she charmed or whether she punished them, she was equally entertaining, as good as a visit to the fighting pits. This, she knew, was how the court felt. Returned from Khanaphes and on her own throne again, she gauged the mood around her, noting with amusement the swelled numbers of courtiers eager to see her latest reception.
But they were the Empire, or at least a certain face of it, the powerful and the ambitious whose desires she yoked to haul her Empire forward. She had divided and wooed them, played favourites, cast down, raised up, and always she had walked with the knives of the Rekef in her shadow. There was no union or alliance of them strong enough to bring her down, not for the moment.
She was aware of how most of them looked at her. She had won them, for now. She was a woman more Wasp-kinden than her brother had ever been. She met the world head-on. She was fierce when ferocity was needed, cunning as required, and when she punished, her abrupt sentences were often carried out before the whole court, less a lesson than a spectacle. She thought that they loved her most of all for that. There was an arbitrariness to her – the one thing she shared with her late brother – that well became a master of the Empire.
For these qualities, they forgave her a few foibles, such as the mystics and Inapt scholars she kept about the court. After all, even the Wasp-kinden had to admit that the Moths and their ilk had ruled the world centuries before, had been great powers in an age when Wasp history was not even being written down. What other great power of the modern world had seen their ambassadors come so meekly and humbly? Was there a Lowlander merchant prince or Assembler who could boast the same?
And now she had some new visitors, and she reclined on the throne to watch as they were escorted through the great doors at the far end of the chamber.
They were three men, all in full armour, and although they must have been aware of the unfriendly attention of the whole room, they made a brave show by marching in step, the last of them bearing a banner sloping across one shoulder: a simple checked field in familiar colours. The style of their mail was familiar to most of her court, or certainly those in active service a decade before: curved plates of chitin overlaying silk and leather and fine chainmail, in shapes elegant and graceful, and slightly too extravagant for an Imperial armourer’s more practical tastes. Where the spectators might have expected scintillating greens and blues and reds, though, all three wore identical colours, segments painted over or enamelled, and the leader’s breastplate newly wrought, so that the chitin’s sparkling finish was resplendent in their colours: black and gold.
They had bunches of moth-antennae plumes, cloaks lined with butterfly scales, torcs of gold and mother of pearl. These Dragonfly-kinden had clearly gone to great pains to impress, unaware that in the Empire such excess would seem quaint and barbaric. As they progressed towards the throne, presenting a study in pride and defiance, they were followed by an undercurrent of derision and mockery. What did they think they were, these savages decked in the livery of Empire? Was this some kind of joke?
‘Speak.’ Seda’s voice rang out, halting them. ‘What do you bring before me?’
There was a small exchange of sidelong glances between the two at the rear, but their leader knelt without hesitation. His brow gleamed a little with sweat, and Seda saw him swallow away a dry throat