Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [40]
‘Majesty, we know what has happened to you, and what inheritance has come to rest within you. The Moths may claim it, but you must know they lie. Perhaps there are some dregs of their power in you, but Uctebri was your master, before now, and it is his tradition that has claimed you – our tradition. Who else can teach you of it, save us? And what will become of you, if you do not learn our ways?’ His lips quirked into a smile, showing the translucent needles of his teeth. ‘Or do you think the might of an empire is sufficient to master what lies within you?’
She stood up abruptly, and her court fell silent even as she did.
‘You are in error,’ she said, letting the soldiers and magnates of her court try to piece together precisely what words she was replying to. ‘You recall to us our brother’s slave, whom you claim as kin. You think to presume upon our favour through his name? I will not deny I knew him, and a cunning trickster he was, whom my brother found an endless fascination. Until he died, creature – until my dear, beloved brother was murdered.’
She sensed the tension all around her now, for this had been a topic brought out frequently in recent months. ‘Though a fighting slave held the blade, no single man could suffice to make an end to my brother,’ she said, and she had practised the emotions so well that nobody could have guessed how much she had laughed, the first time she mouthed those words. ‘We are even now uncovering the depths of the conspiracy that contrived his death.’ It was remarkable, how far that conspiracy had spread, starting from a Rekef general and a Mantis-kinden pit slave and then working outwards, like a plague caught by those who had incurred the Empress’s displeasure, that was uniformly fatal. ‘We know, though, for our Rekef has confirmed it, that at the heart of the knot was none other than my brother’s slave, so trusted and so well placed to betray the throne. You come here thus on a traitor’s business.’
Even as she finished speaking, the guards were moving in, but she was more interested in the peculiar sea-change affecting her courtiers. They were not themselves under the lens – none of them would be hauled off to the fighting pits or the crossed pikes today – and so abruptly they started putting on expressions of vengeful outrage, and looking forward to some entertainment.
‘We shall see them meet a fitting end, for the blood their kind has shed,’ she declared. ‘Have them hung by their heels, then have them bled by the wrists until not one drop remains within them.’ And she did not now say, and have that blood brought to me, but there were those of her staff who knew the drill, and went about her business with fat purses and lips sealed, lest they, too, encounter the same fate. The Mosquitos understood, though, for she saw it in their red eyes. ‘Do not assume,’ she told them, ‘that I am not fully educated as to your traditions.’ Though her court would not understand, it was worth it for their expressions, before they were hauled away.
Invisible to her, there were some hundreds of people making ready within the palace and all across the city. Quartermasters, officers, engineers, chandlers, scouts, cartographers, diplomats, merchants and an army of slaves were smoothing her way so that the Empress’s path should be effortless, greased as it was with the sweat of all their brows.
Her brother Alvdan had never set foot outside the capital. If he had been able to avoid it, he had never left the palace, the scene of his one mean triumph where he had ordered the murder of his siblings at the hands of General Maxin. That the late and unlamented Maxin was now a keystone in the grand and convenient ‘conspiracy’ that Seda had woven around her brother’s death was a source of constant entertainment to her.
The Empire was changing, she knew. Its recent history, even its defeats, had strengthened it and broadened it, and she was not content to sit at home and merely try to fill her father’s shoes, the ones that her brother had tried on for size so many times and