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‘I wish it,’ she told Cean with profound gratitude.

Part Two

The Widow

Seven

The Empire had no great tradition of receiving ambassadors, yet these were not the first who had stood before Seda. They were the strangest, and most of her court did not know what to make of them. The great and good of the Wasp-kinden could not decide whether this was some kind of joke, or a calculated insult from an unknown power, on seeing these three cadaverous creatures standing before the throne.

The small proportion of her court who did understand what these visitors were, and what that signified, had gone quite still – like a cricket that spots the twitch of a mantis amongst the leaves. Those were themselves newcomers, a strange detritus of the Inapt that Seda had been quietly cultivating since she had secured her throne against the other would-be emperors who had begun carving off pieces of her rightful domain after her brother’s death. These other ambassadors – the Moth-kinden, the Grasshoppers, scholars and mystics and magi – stared at the three dark-robed creatures as though they were a nightmare come to life.

It was not just what they represented, that sparked such horror. Nor was it because these things were standing in the Empress’s court in broad daylight, whose true place was in the furthest, darkest holes away from the wrath of civilized peoples. It was a fear that these creatures might have a proposal for Seda: a promise of power that would be both greater and darker than those scraps of support that the Moth-kinden had been trying to get the Empress to accept. The price that would be exacted, in return for their gift of tainted power, threatened to undo centuries of bitter history.

The Mosquito-kinden had come to Capitas.

Seda watched them curiously. She had known only one of their kind before, although that one still cast a long shadow even after his death.

They had come to her in her dreams, these three. She was not sure whether they were scapegoat delegates forced by their fellows to undertake this task, or perhaps the boldest and most ambitious of a people sly and retiring by nature; or whether they were renegades cut off from their own kin and seizing on her unique position for a chance of reprieve. It was in dreams, however, that they had made themselves known, whispering promises of power, of understanding, even a twisted kind of comfort, extending a helping hand to draw her from the sea of blood that they knew she must be drowning in.

In her dreams they had been huge and cloaked in the night sky, their gaunt faces commanding. She had felt tiny before them.

Before her now, they were shorn of such grandeur: three haggard, pallid things, wrinkled and sexless. If it were not for those eyes, they would have seemed just some pack of ancient, mongrel beggars, not even worthy of the Slave Corps’ time. But their protuberant and glistening red eyes dominated their every expression with a naked, hungry gleam. One of them, too, had a patch of red across his brow, like a birthmark save that it seemed to shift fluidly as he glanced about the room in jerky motions.

There had been a war, she knew, for her adviser, Gjegevey, had told her that much. In some forgotten corner of the lost centuries, before her race had come into its own, the Moth-kinden, in their strength and wisdom, had broken the power of the Mosquitos, cast them down and saved the world from their thirst for blood and for dominion. Of course, as all the records were kept in their clever, grey-skinned hands, Seda had only their word for the rights and wrongs of it. As the Moths themselves were long since banished to a few mountain fastnesses by their own triumphant slaves, one might think the issue moot. Official Imperial history certainly did: the squabbles of the Inapt kinden in bygone days were not taught in Wasp schools.

She had surprised them, in the end, for as they had pillaged her dreams, whispering and promising, she had shown them only need and weakness, enticing them to creep from their haunts and converge