As Emperor he took his victories where he wanted, so here she was.
They sat at a table, almost within reach of one another, and servants scuttled to serve them with seedcakes and new-baked bread and warm honeydew. The city beyond was waking up, a hundred dashes of glitter showing his subjects taking to the air. None of the airborne would approach the palace, of course. There were guards enough on the tier above them who would shoot any intruder without question.
And one more guard, of course, to stand uncomfortably close behind his sister, to remind her of her situation.
‘Your name came up in council again,’ he remarked, sipping his honeydew. He seemed all ease here, slouching in his chair, smiling at the servants. She, on the other hand, sat with a spear-straight back, eating little and delicately. Eight years his junior, barely a woman, she had been living in fear now for half her life.
‘General Maxin wishes, I think, to be remembered to you.’
He was adept at reading her. Now, seeing her lips tighten, he broadened his own smile. There was a name she was unlikely to forget. Three brothers and a sister that had separated the two of them in age had all fallen, if not to Maxin’s knife then to his orders.
‘I am sure,’ she said, ‘that I am grateful to the general for his concern.’
He laughed politely. ‘Dear sister Seda, they are all so anxious that you find some direction in your life.’
‘I am touched.’ Seda took a minute bite of seedcake, her eyes never leaving his hands, watching for any signal to the guard hovering behind her. ‘Although I can guess at the direction they have in mind.’
‘They don’t understand how it is between us,’ Alvdan continued. A servant brought him more bread and buttered it for him.
‘I am not sure that I do, Alvdan.’ She sensed the guard shift behind her and added, ‘Your Imperial Majesty.’
‘They think I am so soft-hearted. They agonize over it, that the Emperor of the Wasps should have such a flaw in his character,’ he told her.
‘Then you are right that they clearly do not understand you.’
‘Insolence, sister Seda, does not become one of our line,’ he warned her.
She lowered her head but her eyes stayed with his hands.
‘You and I understand each other, do we not?’ he pressed.
‘We do. Your Majesty.’
‘Tell me,’ he said. She glanced up at him, and he repeated, ‘Tell me. I love to hear the words from you.’
For a second she looked rebellious, but it passed like the weather. ‘You hate and despise me, Majesty. Your joy is in my misery.’
‘And an Emperor deserves all joys in life, does he not,’ he agreed happily. ‘My advisers and their plans! They do not understand your potential. Last year they were plotting to marry you off, to make an honest wife of you. They do not realize that you are not like other women of our race. You are no mere adornment for some man. You are a weapon, and if your hilt were in a man’s hand he would turn your edge on me. I think General Maxin would marry you himself, if I was mad enough to let him.’
She said something quietly, and he rapped his knife-hilt on the table impatiently.
‘I said I would rather die, Your Majesty,’ she answered him.
He smiled broadly at that. ‘Well then perhaps I should hold the option open. I can always have Maxin slain on his nuptial night. That would be a fit wedding present, no?’
‘Your Majesty forgets who he most wishes to hurt,’ she said tiredly.
‘Perhaps. But now they are trying to parcel you off to some order, so as to make an ascetic of you. As though you could not be recalled from there, once my back was turned. And that is the crux. Alive, you will always threaten me. Yet dead. My throne will always require defending and, with your blood staining my hands, who can say from where the next threat might come? So, alive and close you must stay, little sister.’
‘You will keep me only until the succession is secured, Majesty, and then you will have me killed. Perhaps you will even wield the knife yourself, or break me in the interrogation rooms.’
‘Do you tire of life, Seda?’ he asked her.
She reached out for him, then, but the cold steel of the guard’s sword touched her cheek before she could touch even his fingers. With a long sigh she drew back.
‘I have had no life since our father died. What I have had since then is nothing more than a long descent, and every tenday the ground is moved one tenday further off, so that I drop and drop. But one day the ground will stay where it is, and I shall be dashed to pieces.’
‘Beautifully said,’ he told her. ‘Your education has not been wasted after all. Seeing the good use you have made of it, I decide that I shall broaden it.’
This was a change from the usual routine. ‘Your Imperial Majesty?’ she enquired cautiously.
‘A little trip to the dungeons, dear Seda,’ he said and, when she sighed, he added, ‘Not yet, dear sister. It is not your turn yet. Instead there is a most interesting prisoner that General Maxin has brought for me. I think you should see him. Furthermore, I think he is desirous of seeing you.’
The Wasp Empire was all about imposing order. Alvdan the Second’s grandfather Alvric had forced it on his own people, who were a turbulent and savage lot by nature. The original Alvdan, first of that name, had then turned his need for order on the wider world and his namesake son had followed his lead. The imposition of order became all. The multiplicity of ranks and stations within the army, the precise status of the more powerful families, the honours and titles that were the gift of the throne, even the station and privileges of individual slaves — everyone had a place, and those above, and those below.
The maxim applied even to prisoners. There had developed a whole imperial art to the treatment of prisoners — how often they were fed; whether they had a cell a man could stand in, or even lie straight in; whether they were kept damp, kept cold; whether they were dragged out to lie on the artificer-interrogator’s mechanical tables for no other reason than it was their turn, their lowly contribution to the Empire’s sense of order.
Such prisoners as had something to offer the Empire, they could do well for themselves. They could even make the leap, eventually, from prisoner to slave — just as the threat of becoming a prisoner kept the lowest slaves in line.
Judging by such exacting standards, this man her brother had found must have a great deal of potential, for his cell lay on the airiest level of Capitas’s most accommodating prison. He had two rooms to himself, and an antechamber, and the guards even rattled the barred door in advance to announce that he had visitors. In the antechamber there sat three young pages, two boys and a girl, presumably to run errands for the prisoner’s needs. As she considered that, Princess Seda noticed how pale and drawn they all were, and that one was visibly trembling.
She was not really a princess, of course. That was a Commonwealer title that one young officer, desperately gallant and politically naA?ve, had once given her. What fate had befallen him since she did not know, but he had been a brief ray of sun through the clouds that perpetually clogged her life.
The prisoner’s reception chamber was lit by great windows, latticed with metal bars, that extended across almost an entire wall, and opened up part of the ceiling as well. There were no curtains, she saw. The sun flooded unopposed across the floor until it met the doorway into the sleeping chamber. That room was quite dark, muffled in drapes, and impenetrable to her gaze.
‘Your Emperor is here,’ one of the guards announced. ‘Present yourself!’
For a moment it seemed that nothing would happen, and then Seda heard a shuffling from within the darkness, and at last a hooded figure in tattered robes came forward tentatively to the brink of the dazzling light. One hand, pale as death and thin as bone, was raised against the sun.