And Ernain would take his Auxillians, stripping away a little short of half the Imperial army’s strength. The lesser half, most Wasps would say, but half was half. Numbers weren’t everything, but they were something no general would go without if he had the chance.
And even with those numbers there are no guarantees.
At first he had been furious. How hard it had been to keep himself from having Ernain and Oski, traitors both, arrested or even executed. Making angry decisions was not a trait a general allowed in himself, though. So Tynan had let them go, and he had read over Ernain’s new model Empire, and he had pondered.
Then he had sent for them all, so they had come, and others with them, elbowing each other for room in his little tent.
Here they were, jostling for their place in the history books: Nessen, former governor of Helleron; Merva, the Solarnese governor’s wife; Varsec the aviation expert, except that now he was dancing attendance on General Lien himself, the lord of the Engineers having finally been drawn from his lair beneath Severn Hill. Major Vorken the slaver was still skulking about at the back, a large and powerful man cowed into submission by the fact of his inferior rank.
A Beetle-kinden had arrived, too, apparently unbidden: Honory Bellowern, whom Tynan recalled as the Imperial diplomatic aide in Collegium, but who was now apparently engaged on the business of his wealthy and powerful family. He carried the seal and authority of its patriarch, the venerable Auder Bellowern, on whose word large sections of the Empire’s economy might start and stop.
And there was General Marent, of course, and there was Ernain of Vesserett – Tynan couldn’t think of him as just Captain Ernain any more – with Major Oski at his side. Quite a gathering, all told.
‘Marent,’ Tynan said, reaching out for a man he hoped would back his strategy. ‘Your words: there’s a rot at the heart of the Empire. We’ve heard what Vorken and Varsec have had to say about the slave camps. We know that I’m currently disobeying a direct order just by preparing to defend Capitas from the Sarnesh, rather than hand myself in. We’ve seen that things have gone wrong, terribly wrong.’
‘Yes,’ Marent replied forcefully, his stern gaze daring anyone present to disagree. There were plenty of unhappy expressions, but none that gainsaid him.
‘You tried to suggest, then, that we needed a new head wearing the crown.’
Utter silence as that ultimate treason was revisited. Tynan looked round at the newcomers, noting Lien’s narrowed eyes, Honory Bellowern’s politic lack of expression.
‘Have you reconsidered your position, General?’ It’s not too late, Marent was saying.
‘I have not,’ Tynan told him. Best to make that plain from the start. ‘However, it’s safe to say that we’re not the only ones who have been thinking on those lines, who’ve noticed that things are falling apart. The Empire has spoken, or at least significant parts of it.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nessen demanded. ‘Rebellion?’
‘Not yet,’ Tynan said. He felt ferociously tired. ‘Not armed uprising, anyway, but something . . .’ He nodded at the Bee-kinden, whom most of his guests must have been wondering about. ‘Ernain here has brought an ultimatum.’
He talked them through it, then, just as Ernain himself had stood in this very tent and explained it all to him. Looking from Wasp face to Wasp face, he saw their anger – at being blackmailed in the Empire’s greatest time of need, but also just at the suggestion itself. He saw, on many faces, the very problem that Ernain and his followers were making a stand against. How dare these slaves, these lesser kinden, dictate to us?
‘Put one in ten on the crossed pikes and they’ll soon come to their senses,’ Nessen said when Tynan finished. Nessen: the man who had never even commanded an army.
‘No, they will not,’ Tynan told him heavily. ‘They are ready to leave, right now. If we attack them they will fight back, and no doubt the Lowlanders will reward them for it – Milus has his agents in amongst them, making promises.’
‘This is his doing?’ Marent asked. There was a terrible vulnerability in his face, wholly unbefitting a general. I probably looked the same when that Bee-kinden bastard put this to me.
‘It is not,’ Tynan confirmed, and only just prevented himself from saying, No, it is ours. ‘This has been brewing for a long time, at least since the traitor governors. They have looked at the Empire, and they have come to exactly the same conclusion as we have: that it must change. The only difference lies in the degree of change.’
‘The only difference, Tynan?’ Lien demanded. ‘You’re talking . . . everything.’
‘Oh, no, no, General.’ Honory Bellowern’s smooth voice. ‘Not everything. Only little things. The top of the ziggurat, that’s all. The base and all its levels can remain mostly undisturbed.’ Most of the Wasps were staring at him now, and he swallowed a little nervously and then went on, ‘So a little self-rule for those cities who – let us face the truth – have been more stalwart in their support of the Empire than many whom the Empire put in place to govern them. A few more free men working harder for coin than slaves will for bread. And, in place of all that pressure of government resting on a single point, an Assembly of the great and the good, all working towards the benefit of the state. The Empress has her advisers, does she not? And if those advisers had been more than mere decoration, had been given real authority to check the excesses of the throne’s power, then perhaps we might not be in this position even now.’
‘Tynan.’ Marent was sounding slightly choked. ‘Am I to take it you support this?’
Tynan closed his eyes, picturing the Lowlanders nearing with every heartbeat, but more than that: he saw thirty years of Imperial history, the waste of the Twelve-year War, the profiteering of the slavers, the Rekef infighting, how swiftly the traitor governors had arisen, how brutally the power of a single man or woman could be exercised when they had literally nobody to tell them ‘no’. And is this any better? Is Collegium really a model of efficient governance?
The mocking thought followed: Measure them by the Imperial yardstick: who will be at whose gates tomorrow?
‘I do,’ he said. It was said so quietly, and yet everyone was craning forwards to catch the words.
There was an instant outburst of horror and argument, but Marent shouted them down.
‘Tynan, I would have followed you to the throne, and knelt to you as Emperor,’ he declared. His eyes were hollow, accusing. Why could you not have said yes to the crown? Then the words came out of him like gall, vomited forth as though the taste of them sickened him. But they were: ‘I will follow you in this. Your judgement, Tynan, over all.’
‘No, no, listen,’ Nessen insisted, sounding terrified, almost in tears. ‘Yes, the Empress is clearly mad, but there’s no need to undo all we’ve built, all we have. It was our mistake ever to allow a woman on the throne. Women aren’t made for such things.’
There was some nodding at this, despite Merva’s immediate complaint, which Nessen blithely ignored. But Tynan was shaking his head.