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There was a Bee-kinden wing, where artefacts from the city of Vesserett were on display: their graceful yet functional carving, their elegant illustrated scrolls, all the trappings of their emergent power from the days in which they had been the nascent Empire’s first challenge. There was a hall of Grasshopper-kinden art from Sa, where slave musicians would play on certain days. There was a cellar tricked out to look like a Mole Cricket-kinden dwelling from Delve. There were three halls devoted to the Commonweal, one lined with the swords and armour of two score Dragonfly nobles, all of it recovered during the war, and many displaying the damage that had done for their original owners. The Wasp-kinden strolled through these rooms and learned a little about those far-flung cultures, those disparate peoples, but most of all they learned how they were superior because these things were all the spoils of conquest. It was the same lesson as taught by the deaths of foreign combatants in the arena, but more lasting.

The Empress herself had made her fondness for this establishment widely known, and the Beetle-kinden Consortium family who were behind it had been richly rewarded. It was well known, indeed, that after dark, when the museum was locked up, she would use its empty halls to speak to those who had particularly attracted her notice. It was, everyone knew, a sign of great favour.

Her companion tonight was one Major Karrec, a man of good family and good standing in the Consortium. As she paced the length of the Commonweal hall, the vacant helms of fallen nobles regarding her gravely from either side, he regaled her with stories of his war exploits and his cleverness in the face of the enemy. He was a man of middle height, running slightly to fat from a life far from rigorous, but there was a spark about him, she thought. As there should be.

Behind the two of them, a pair of her Mantis-kinden bodyguards paced silently, the metal claws of their gauntlets folded back.

He smiled at her, did Karrec, and walked closer than was appropriate, and she realized that he was crossing that old familiar line, as she thought he might. As the Empress, on high, she was only female in the abstract, but if she allowed her underlings any familiarity, then some of them would begin to treat her as women had always been treated in the Empire: as something to be possessed and controlled.

As they reached the end of the hall, Karrec stopped and stared. He had been discoursing on some of the suits of mail, obviously familiar with the exhibits, but now he frowned. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, forgive me. I don’t recall a hall beyond this one.’

‘It is not for public viewing yet, Major,’ she said sweetly. ‘However, I have asked our curators to open it tonight, just for us.’

He was encouraged by that, she saw, and she wondered just how deluded he might be about his prospects. Still, it was all to her advantage, so she let him dream while he could.

The chamber beyond was small compared with the museum’s other halls, a simple box of a room that seemed as though it had been left to moulder for decades, until the walls had grown a patina of mould and lichen, the plaster decaying and falling away to turn the smooth surfaces into a maze of canyons and eroded topography, all of it made to shiver and move under the light of two ensconced torches. Karrec was not quite so oblivious as to take that sight in his stride, and he hesitated in the doorway, until she turned back and smiled at him.

‘A remarkable effect, yes? I understand the craftsmen laboured at it for days.’

‘But what is it for?’ he asked, entering cautiously.

‘This is the Mantis-kinden hall,’ she explained. ‘It is small, as there are few such in the Empire, but they possess a fascinating culture nonetheless.’

He glanced back at the two guards, who had stopped at the doorway. ‘And they’re friends to the throne now, I see.’

‘Oh, they were gifts from the clever Moth-kinden of Tharn,’ she explained. ‘Half