Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [88]
Seda had stood on the city’s western walls, those parts that had not been tested by the Imperial ordnance brought against them by the Many of Nem, and watched the Empire’s punitive force set off. It was expected of her, for all that she understood very little of it. It reminded her of that strange little meeting in the Scriptora: the colonel of Engineers, the two disgraced artificers and the Iron Glove’s halfbreed, all talking so knowledgeably about things that she could not understand. Not one of them had guessed at her ignorance or, if they had, they had assumed it was the simple lack of knowledge fitting for someone Apt but untrained. In reality they might as well have been making animal noises when they spoke of their craft, but she had been well briefed. She did not need to know how their machines worked. She only needed to know the result. They might claim to have an engine that would tear down a wall, but all that mattered to her was that the wall fell. She relied on people such as Gjegevey to brief her.
She knew, for example, that an observer from a more mechanically minded city than Khanaphes might wonder about the large quantity of machinery that this punitive force was taking into the desert with it: machinery that would seem to serve little martial purpose. However, once away from the city walls, any such observer would be advised to keep his or her distance.
And it was not all lies, either. Certainly the Scorpion-kinden were in for a rude awakening in the near future, for any tribe of the Many of Nem luckless enough to get within sight of this expedition would be wiped out. There would be Scorpion heads aplenty to satisfy the Khanaphir. After all, we are here as friends, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy.
So now Majors Angved and Varsec had departed, off to undertake their incomprehensible task in the desert: their peculiar mechanical mining for this mineral oil that the artificers had been so impressed with. So much for the Empire’s formal purpose in coming to this place.
She was left here as an honoured guest in the city, with enough well-trained soldiers to ensure that she could make the place an Imperial protectorate at any moment she chose. No doubt her people expected that, once having shown her face here, she would be back inside the airship and heading to the capital soon enough.
But she had another purpose, too. Gjegevey’s stories of the city had whetted it, but she had forged the idea for herself beforehand.
My dreams, she reflected, but that was not quite accurate. Better to say ‘the dreams’, because, for all that she had woken from them, they came from another’s mind entirely: the stone halls, the statues, the carvings, the darkness, the colossal tombs that were not tombs at all . . .
And the power, that naked, palpable power, it had called out to her across all the miles, until she had woken three nights running with the name ‘Khanaphes’ on her lips. And now she was here, and this mundane city was hers, but beneath her was a power unmastered and ancient.
Waiting . . .
Nights in Khanaphes were cool but not cold. The stone of the city seemed to have some secret treaty with the sun, holding back just sufficient of its daytime heat to stave off the dark’s chill. Outside the Imperial embassy, the vast star-pocked sky seemed to suck all warmth and light towards itself, untrammelled by cloud, the constellations seeming to loom impossibly close.
Seda stood in the Place of Foreigners, the ornamental square at the heart of the various embassies that the Khanaphir had put up for their foreign guests, a thousand years before, when their city had still been clinging to the skirts of greatness. The statues of the great powers of yesteryear regarded her and judged her impartially: Spider, Mantis, Moth, Woodlouse, and of them all perhaps only the Spider-kinden remained a power in this world. Her own people were not represented: