‘Where is she?’ Tynan demanded of him. ‘Where’s the Empress?’
‘She . . .’ Tears were running down Brugan’s face, which twitched and jumped as though maggots were running just beneath the skin. ‘She’s gone, just gone . . . She fell, far, far away . . . Help me get her back, Tynan. We have to get her back.’ His hands scrabbled at the carved wood of the throne.
Tynan regarded him impassively for a moment and then lifted a hand, not knowing whether it was necessity or revulsion or mere pity that moved him. The crackle and flash of his sting echoed about the chamber, and Brugan’s body rocked back against the throne and then slid to the floor.
No Empress? No Empress and no confrontation, but here was Tynan in the heart of Empire, and nobody to contest the declaration he cast before the throne. He would have to trust to men such as the Bellowerns to ensure that everything held together now, while he got on with his real job.
Soon afterwards the word came: the Lowlander army had been sighted.
Forty-Three
Stenwold woke up.
For a moment, standing there, he had a sense of a great whirl of sound and motion, nearby and yet unseen, as though it was in a further room, in some space separated from him by the thinnest of membranes and yet utterly invisible, undetectable.
He was in Myna. He remembered now.
Before him the gates rose solid and whole, and he felt waves of memory wash over him. He remembered watching them through a telescope while they shuddered under the impact of the Wasps’ ramming engine, but that had been a long time ago, in a world now lost. Those gates had fallen, and then the wall . . . years after, when the Empire had come again . . .
He looked left and right, seeing that remembered wall intact now, re-edified and restored to be the perfect mimic of the way everything had been, before it all started.
There was nobody else there, just Stenwold before the gates of Myna.
Again he sensed a wave of commotion just beyond his reach, the clatter of metal, a woman’s voice – a woman he knew? – making demands. Atryssa? Arianna? No, another woman he knew and loved. A face ghosted brokenly through his mind, of a woman who looked like a Spider-kinden but wasn’t, not quite.
Besides, they were dead, the others. The thought seemed obscurely wrong. As he stood here before those unbreached gates, how could they be dead? Time had respooled itself, surely. All the pieces were back in their box.
He turned from the gates slowly, feeling the city about him blur slightly each time it moved, as though his image of it took a second to catch up. Myna rose up before him in its tiers, towards that top airfield where . . . Again those layers of memory interfered with each other.
There was nobody else in sight. He had the city to himself.
The Consensus building was in its proper place again – no sign of the hideous ziggurat the Wasps had replaced it with after they took the city the first time, nor the mess of scaffolding that was all the second Consensus hall had amounted to before the Empire had knocked it right back down again.
Is this a second chance? he wondered. What happens if I just walk away? If I open those gates, what will I see? A Wasp army? Or just the view out towards the hills of the Antonine?
Or nothing?
Instead, he set off into the city slowly, uncertainly. Each step seemed to be over the edge of an abyss until it landed. The Myna of his memories shivered and danced, always on the point of fracturing.
Here there was only silence. Somewhere else a woman was crying.
Hokiak’s Exchange was still there, although he felt somehow that the geography had been twisted in order to lead him to it, the city’s layout subtly corrupted by his imperfect recall. The old sign swung gently in a wind Stenwold could not feel.
If I go in, will I find the old man there? And then a sharp memory. But he’s left. Last time, he was gone. And the Consensus was in ruins and then the walls . . . the walls came down. For a moment the image threatened to overwhelm what he was seeing, buildings become vacant, decaying shells; the skies alive with fighting orthopters; incendiaries from the greatshotters unfolding their bright blooms, Sentinels on the streets. The ground beneath him shifted, and he knew that way dissolution lay.
He clung to the peace of his past, that moment before Stenwold Maker the idealist scholar had become Stenwold Maker the driven statesman, chief of all the enemies of the Empire. Rather keep Myna like this, before the Wasps came. He was too tired and too old to go through all that again.
He walked on through the still and soundless city, searching for a way out that had nothing to do with the city gates. He let his feet lead him where they would.
A townhouse stood within sight of the gates. He remembered it welclass="underline" far better than he remembered many more recent things. Where it all started. For a long moment, for a time that he could not measure, he stood before it while, just a hair’s breadth away, there was such panic and shouting, hands dragging at him, the clatter of surgeons’ tools.
He went in.
Seda stood up slowly. Tynisa watched her.
The Empress of the Wasps stared about herself at the terrible enclosing dark, barely kept at bay by the lone fire that Tynisa needed in order to see. Below them, past the great huddled mass of non-combatants, the thin line of armed slaves surged back and forth, still desperately trying to keep the Worm from breaking through. The slaves yelled and screamed, cried out in shock and agony, shouted encouragement to one another. The Worm remained silent, incapable of words.
‘What have you done?’ Seda demanded.
Beside Tynisa, Che did not answer. I don’t think I really believed that would work, said the expression on her face.
The Empress was backing away from her, though there was precious little space – not far to go without climbing a sheer wall or approaching the Worm. ‘What have you done, you stupid child?’ she cried out. ‘My ritual—’
‘I could not allow you to complete it,’ Che told her simply. ‘I could not be a party to such magic. I hope that, in dragging you down here, I have saved at least some of the lives you sought to squander.’
‘Squander?’ Seda shouted at her. ‘I was saving the world from the Worm.’
A fragile smile made its way on to Che’s face. ‘And I was saving the world from you.’
For a moment Seda just stared at her, face twitching with shock and incomprehension, and then fury gripped her hard enough that her entire body jolted, and she thrust out a palm at Che to burn her from the face of the world.
Tynisa lunged forwards – ready for this moment she had known must come – and her rapier’s point opened up the Empress’s hand, severing two fingers. The appalled Wasp fell back with a cry that owed more to outrage than to pain, and Tynisa drove in to finish the job.
Her blade struck steel that deflected her thrust, and she dropped back immediately, making space and keeping her sword between her and the newcomer. For, of course, he was here.
Tisamon had come to the aid of his mistress.
In the poor light he was just an armoured shadow, his claw a crooked extension of his barbed arm. As Seda hunched backwards, cradling her ruined hand, the revenant of Tynisa’s father stepped closer to her, protectively.