Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [41]
My grandfather Alvric unified the tribes and defeated our nearest neighbours, and he was great in one way. My father Alvdan the First built an empire, and was great in another. My poor brother’s failing was in never finding his own path to greatness, but living off the table scraps of our family history. I have my own road now. And she did, and her forebears would never have guessed at it.
From the shade of her rooms she stepped out on to a balcony, into the bright sunlight, looking down the tiered flanks of the palace, over Capitas the golden city. The sky above it teeming with Wasps and Flies engaged on her errands, the streets coursing with her subjects, warehouses crammed with her treasures, barracks thronging with her armies. Above and to either side of her balcony, several of those soldiers tensed as soon as she showed herself, instantly casting their gaze skywards, in case any of her loyal subjects should harbour conspiratorial designs. Wasp Art furnished its devotees with wings and hands that were deadly at a distance, and for the Empress to stand thus in the open would be a gift to any assassin, which perhaps explained the late Emperor’s reclusive habits.
But I know more than you ever did, Seda reflected, because castigating her dead brother was another source of amusement to her. She was slowly mastering her newfound skills, but the ability to read others and to know of danger, and to turn minds, all these were increasingly within her grasp. Last year an assassin had broken into her very bedchamber. She had talked to him all through the night, and when the guards eventually found him, he was ready to swear undying allegiance to the throne.
She had ordered the intruder skinned alive.
Her shadows moved with her, her constant guards. They were gifts from the Moth-kinden of Tharn, and she knew that her regular soldiers worried about exactly where their loyalties lay. Only Seda could see their hearts, however, and she had twisted them, and twisted them again, by gifts and words, promises and understandings, until the half-dozen Mantis-kinden killers were hers through and through, pledged inviolably to her by their ancient knots of honour. They carried bows and the short-bladed clawed glove that only the Mantids cared for, and any assassins that wished to try their luck would find the Empress’s bodyguards waiting.
She heard the shuffle of feet behind her, and sensed her Mantis-kinden escort tense for a moment. There were few allowed in her chambers unbidden, though, and once they recognized the Woodlouse-kinden, Gjegevey, they relaxed again. The old slave was her favourite adviser, and a supporter of hers since before the Emperor’s death; and if she had learned one lesson from her brother’s failures it was to reward loyal service. More than that, though, Gjegevey understood what she was, what she had become, and what she wanted.
‘I, ahm, understand all is in readiness.’ To the Wasps he was a bizarre spectacle, outlandishly tall and thin, yet so crook-backed that it seemed that he was meant to be taller still. His skin was a pallid greyish-white, with darker bands starting at his forehead and patterning the top of his bald head before disappearing down beneath his robes behind. He claimed to be older than the Empire itself, but his eyes were sharp in their nest of wrinkles. His people dwelt north and east of Wasp lands, she understood, in some steaming swamp-forest of eternally rotting trees, and his kinden were seldom seen. Once, he had been an agent for whatever nebulous leadership existed amongst his scholarly and retiring fellows, but time had eroded the particulars of his original briefing, so now he was hers entirely.
‘Khanaphes,’ she pronounced it carefully, ‘is known to your people, I am sure, in far greater detail than you have described it.’
‘Memory fails me . . .’ he said vaguely. ‘But perhaps the sight of it will stir some, ah, recollection in me. Without much, hmn, hope, it behoves me to sound my old note of caution once again, Majesty. There are other ways.’
‘We will exhaust