‘The numbers are interesting,’ Tynan observed. There were still far more Wasps here than any other kinden, but the rabble of others could just about balance them, if they were all pointed in the same direction. And of course there’s no guarantee that we Wasps will all see things the same way, either. Chaos! Surely it will be chaos. ‘I think the Consortium bloc is going to be deciding a great many things.’
Ernain nodded. ‘Only if you’re thinking of us as your enemies, General. Who knows: maybe we both want to stick it to the Consortium.’
Tynan managed a brief, cut-off laugh and, in its wake, he saw a businesslike look in Ernain’s eyes.
‘Are you ready?’ the Bee-kinden asked him.
‘Why me, Ernain?’
‘Because I trust you, and the cities will follow my lead for now. Because your own people trust you – you’re the closest thing they have to a hero. You negotiated an end to the war: a graceful surrender that preserved their dignity and the lives of their sons. And because an Assembly needs a Speaker, even an Imperial Assembly.’
‘How can we be an Imperial Assembly without an Empress?’ Tynan demanded, knowing that this battle was already lost.
‘You yourself said that there was no actual body. The Empress is . . . gone. Not dead, but gone. In her absence, we shall govern in her name.’
‘Until she returns in our hour of need?’ Tynan asked sardonically.
‘Perhaps. It’s worked out well, don’t you think?’
Tynan looked out across the sea of faces, the sea of kinden, all those frightened people who wanted him to tell them how this was going to work. ‘Just so long as she never does come back,’ he remarked grimly.
Months after, in the remote reaches of the Tharen mountains, a cloaked figure struggled through the high passes to reach the door of a reclusive community that almost nobody knew of, even amongst the Moth-kinden.
The door was opened by a Wasp who had given up the life of a soldier a decade before. For a long time he stared at their visitor, not quite believing his eyes.
Soon after, he was conducting the visitor through the lamp-lit halls, past all those others who had turned away from a military life and sought the peace of the Broken Sword.
‘I must ask,’ the Wasp said finally. ‘Your . . . scars . . .?’
Esmail paused a long time before answering. ‘A small price to pay,’ was all he said, in the end.
Soon after, he entered a room where a Dragonfly-kinden woman waited, with three children gathered nervously about her skirts.
Esmail had come home.
The road from the Exalsee to the Commonweal was a long one, and Maure never made it back. Instead, misadventure took her into the Empire in all its turmoil, stepping between the gears of government even as men such as Tynan were trying to fit them into place. She fed herself and kept herself free through her old trade of necromancy, calling up the dead and laying them to rest, easing grief and sorrow at a time when there was more than enough of both.
What surprised her was how easily it came back to her. At first she thought herself mistaken – overestimating herself after that long spell in darkness when she had nothing at all – but in the end she had to conclude: No, this is real.
All over the Empire, the Lowlands and beyond, other magicians were waking up to the fact that the magic, all that magic that had been locked away to maintain the Seal, was slowly coming back.
As for Maure, she headed northwards every day that she could, and in the end crossed over the Empire’s far northern border to the rotting forests where the Woodlice live, those who had trained her, and who knew no strife, nor drew any great distinctions between Apt and Inapt, and who had the greatest libraries in the world, and there she made her home and lived for a long time.
A year after the war, and finding that life in both Collegium and Solarno was no longer to her taste, te Schola Taki-Amre took an experimental orthopter, powered jointly by Nemean fuel oil and new metal gearing, past the west coast of the Lowlands to brave the storms and the open sea in order to either discover new lands or, alternatively, to circumnavigate the world.
She never returned.
Three years later
They had left the broken Amphiophos forum just as it was, so that the city’s Assembly met under the open sky, and thus remembered, and managed to conclude its important business remarkably quickly when foul weather threatened. Around that open space, which had become known as the Assembly Gardens, the three years since the war’s end had cultivated the offices and staterooms and archives that the city could apparently not do without, under the firm guidance of Jen Reader as head of the restoration committee.
And there was still restoration to be done, for the war had left the city with plenty of scars. When people complained, Reader simply told them, Be glad you’re not living in Myna. Everyone knew how much work the Mynans still had ahead of them.
For the last few tendays the whole city had been alive with speculation. The recovery of Collegium – of the Lowlands as a whole – was sufficiently advanced that the Assembly had voted to hold the Games once more. The last time had been just before the first war, and the intervening years had burdened the Collegiates with other priorities that they were only now able to shed.
The Games themselves were still a tenday away, but today would be a test of Eujen’s abilities as Speaker. He was aware that he would need to do well. The Lots were not so very far off, and any embarrassment now would be raked up when the time came for people to consider whether they still wanted him around. The fact that he was thinking in such terms vaguely disgusted him, but at the same time he felt considerably more sympathetic to those who had gone before.
He lodged near the Amphiophos these days, but even the short walk still took him some time. He made it anyway, every working day. It was a point of pride for the only Assembler who had to remember to wind his legs up every evening. It reminded him, and all who saw him, never to take things for granted.
The offices of the Amphiophos were bustling today, filled not just with the city’s representatives and the host of clerks and bureaucrats and errand-runners who made the wheels of government turn, but with a glut of foreigners. Everywhere one looked there were strange faces, the diplomatic staff of a dozen states come to Collegium to discuss the world’s ills.
‘Master Speaker.’ A Fly-kinden man of middle years found him the moment he had stepped inside.
‘Arvi.’ Eujen had taken the previous Speaker’s secretary on because, he had reasoned, at least someone at the heart of government should know what he was doing. ‘Our delegates?’
‘Most of them already in the Gardens,’ the Fly confirmed with pride, as though he had personally herded them there.
Perhaps he did, Eujen mused. ‘I’ll rely on you to make the introductions.’
‘Of course.’ Arvi led the way, a little man with his head held high.
Stepping outside again, into that sprawling walled garden where the Assembly now met, Eujen had to stop and stare. He knew a fair few of the faces, of course, but never before had they all been together in one place.
He spotted the Vekken ambassador in deep conversation with a Sarnesh woman and the Tseni who spoke for the Atoll Confederation, or whatever that new business along the west coast was calling itself. Three Ants of different cities earnestly conspiring together, and Eujen wondered whether this would be the start of the united Ant nations that everyone was so worried about, and decided that he would bet against it. Not just yet, but who can say about tomorrow?