Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [39]
When they were close enough to her walls, she had sent soldiers out for them with a polite but forceful invitation to the Imperial court. Here they were: three scraps of old night caught now in the daylight that her artificers funnelled into her throne room, through shafts and high-set windows. Had they come after dusk as they planned, they would have found no less of a glare from the gas lamps. She could see them flinching from it, all the progress and the newness, trying to steady themselves against the moving tide of history.
But she owed their kinden something, and that had earned them a public audience. Also, it did no harm to remind the Moths and the others that she was no creature’s toy, not theirs, nor the Mosquitos’.
‘You have travelled so very long to present yourselves to me,’ she said now, looking down on them from her central seat. On each side of her throne were three lesser seats where her brother had seated his advisers, but these days she seldom shared her glory with anyone. Had her regent been here, then perhaps she would have permitted him a place beside her, but they told her he was dead in some far-off city. Oh, the lies they thought she swallowed, when she could see through them all.
The three Mosquito-kinden had no doubt pictured this meeting differently: they as the masters, and she the meek supplicant. Their obvious discomfort amused her. ‘Speak,’ she encouraged them. ‘Surely such a great journey is of some great import. Have you a boon you wish to ask of me?’
Because they did not know precisely the corner they were backed into, or perhaps because they did, they found their courage from somewhere. One, the oldest and most haggard of the lot, stepped forward.
‘Empress,’ he began, his voice quiet yet carrying, which was an old trick of the Inapt. ‘Your most royal Majesty, you know who we are. The name of the Mosquito-kinden is not foreign to you.’
Seda heard the murmur echo about her court, among the Apt segments of it anyway. There were many there who still clung to the idea that the Mosquitos were nothing but a myth to frighten children with, either lost to time or merely a fiction from the start. There were enough, though, who remembered the Emperor Alvdan’s favourite slave, red-eyed and hungry-faced, a creature akin to these. Uctebri the Sarcad, he had called himself, and few recalled him fondly. Perhaps a few there even knew something of Uctebri’s appetites, of the servants and slaves he left pallid and shaking, and sometimes dead and withered, in his wake. In this new age of a young empress, perhaps it was time for the people of the Empire to reconsider their beliefs, Seda thought.
She had essayed a cautious nod, and the Mosquito-kinden spokesman took this as encouragement. ‘We bring you gifts,’ he claimed. ‘Gifts not of simple treasures, for who could match the treasury of an empire, but gifts of understanding. We see the old faces here at your court, of those who have persecuted and oppressed us throughout the ages. No doubt they claim that they will give you wisdom. We know all too well their narrow-minded creed, Majesty. They will piece out knowledge to you with a parsimonious hand, and pass you only those scraps from their table that they think you fit for. They would presume to judge an empress, believing that their own power is anything but a shadow in these days.’ The visible reaction of those he railed against emboldened him further. ‘Majesty, we are a people in hiding, for they would slay us even now, if they could. Let us serve you, let us teach you our lore, let us be your mentors in all the old ways. You shall find us more open-handed by far than these.’
He waited, but she let herself seem thoroughly absorbed by his words, perhaps a little cowed by them. He shuffled closer, until her guards tensed, and she lifted a hand to hold them back. She let the gaunt, robed figure approach until its hushed next words would be lost to most of her