Even then, with that responsibility on him, he had retained his control. He had faced off against General Tynan with utter confidence in the Empress’s orders. Then the Empress had returned to Capitas, though, and she had changed.
There was something terribly twisted, now, in that link he shared with his mistress. Whatever had happened, whatever she had done in the Mantis forest to the north, it had marked her. She had nightmares, and Vrakir shared them helplessly. She tormented herself. She feared.
In her dreams she was beneath the earth, and things moved there. They crawled and burrowed, they scratched and dug, fighting ever closer to the surface. And it was her fault, he knew, experiencing her dreams. The Empress was to blame, and she had lost something, left something behind, when she fled to Capitas. She was not whole, and she could not escape her bonds to that lost part of her.
From the earth, such fear, so that Vrakir found himself steadying himself as if the ground beneath him would suddenly betray him. And, worst of all, this was no irrational fear, but very real. The Empress understood entirely what there was to be scared of.
And he sent word for the army’s scouts, and he heard their reports: there were isolated farms and mills found empty, only the ground around them disturbed. One entire village had been abandoned, no sign of where its hundred or so inhabitants had gone. The ground was marked with spiral patterns and some of the buildings were cracked as though they had been undermined.
Vrakir fought against sleep, awake even past midnight alone in the empty house he had seized, and still the Empress’s nightmares howled in the hollow spaces of his mind.
‘I don’t understand. Who is it you’re meeting here?’ Raullo wanted to know.
‘No idea.’ Sartaea te Mosca sipped at her wine, holding the bowl in both hands. She had brought the Beetle artist to a taverna near the College: the Press House on Salkind Way. The place was still a student haunt, and there was a passage that ran to one of the dormitories, meaning that curfew was negotiable. The windows were even now being shuttered against the dusk, and soon the landlord would lock the Wasps out and pretend to be shut.
Sartaea was an occasional visitor to the Press House in any case, but tonight she had a purpose: word had come that she should meet someone here, no more detail than that.
‘It’s a trap.’ Raullo was well into his wine, but then he could sink quite a lot of it these days. He cut an odd figure in the city, awkward father to a wild and unrepresentative school of painting that had followers amongst locals and Imperials alike and was beginning to spawn imitators. She had brought him along tonight to watch her back in case her mysterious contact turned out to be someone she would rather not be seen with.
‘Well, if so . . .’ She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing illegal about meeting someone. Even after curfew, so long as you’re indoors.’
‘I still don’t like it,’ Raullo muttered.
‘Oh, hush,’ she told him, and then there was a scream. It was outside but sounded as though it was somewhere just along their street, and the taverner paused, about to close the last shutters. Collegium had become used to screams after dark, though. Those caught breaking curfew were punished, and if they were women the Wasp soldiers might exact the penalty then and there.
Raullo opened his mouth to pass another comment, but suddenly there was a whole chorus of yells and shouts outside, and the floor beneath them shuddered to the grinding sound of stone on stone. Sartaea and the artist stared at one another, and a few of the patrons stood up uneasily, waiting to see if there would be more. A couple were already inching towards the back room and to the trapdoor that would take them underground and away.
The taverner had been peering round the edges of the window, trying to see, but now he sprang back with a curse.
‘What? What is it?’ Sartaea demanded of him.
‘I thought I saw . . . Something ran past, something . . .’
The sounds of panic were escalating outside; the floor quivered again.
‘What are they doing? Is it more fighting?’ Raullo whispered. ‘Please, no.’
Sartaea abandoned him to go to the window, wings lifting her higher so she could see. She got there just in time to see the house across the street begin to shake, cracks snaking up the walls.
‘Save us,’ she whispered. The building was coming down all on its own. There had been no explosion, no roar of artillery, but the structure was suddenly falling in on itself, collapsing and dragging the neighbouring buildings towards one another, and there were . . .
Her eyes were keen in the dusk but still she could not quite believe what she saw: figures emerging from the wreckage, swift and sure and together, a long chain of them seemingly vomited up from the earth itself.
Then there was a banging at the door. Raullo stood abruptly, knocking his chair backwards and dragging a dagger from his belt.
‘You have to get out!’ someone was yelling. ‘Out of the taverna!’
The taverner threw the door open before anyone could stop him, revealing a Fly-kinden man there, cloaked and hooded.
‘Get out now!’ he snapped. ‘Something bad’s happening all down this street.’ As some of the patrons began to run for the rear, he called out after them. ‘Not that way! Not down! Out of the door and head for home!’
‘Who are you?’ Sartaea demanded, though she thought she knew him. Was he not . . .?
He locked eyes with her. ‘Miss te Mosca . . . some other time. Get yourself out of here, all of you!’
The ground below the taverna shifted. Abruptly the floor was canted towards the cellar stairs. From down there came a scream, then more: some of the patrons had already tried to escape that way.
They’ll be crushed! But the screams went on, and Sartaea heard the clash of metal. No, they’re being attacked – but by what? The Wasps? And yet she knew it was not the Wasps. Some sense, some vestigial awareness born of her paltry magical ability, was screaming at her.
Still, she went to help. It was not in her to refuse it. The cloaked Fly was on her in a moment, wings casting him across the crowded room to bundle her to the floor.
‘Get off me!’ she yelled into his face, and his name was in her mind even as she did so, ‘Laszlo!’
‘Out, please!’ he insisted, but then Raullo had taken a swing at him, drunken and clumsy, and the Fly’s nimble dodge took his weight off her and she darted for the cellar stairs.
They were emerging even as she got there. She saw pale faces looking up at her from the gloom, colourless eyes, sunken cheeks. She locked gazes with one pair of those eyes, but there was no contact, no human interchange, and then they were moving all at once, the band of them uncoiling from the cellar and taking the stairs at a run.
She let out a hoarse yell of sheer panic and reached for her magic to cloak her. Her magic . . .
She had none. In that same stunned moment, her mind turned the word over, ‘magic’, and found nothing in it, no meaning at all.
Then a hand hooked her shoulder and virtually threw her at the door to the street: not little Laszlo but Raullo’s solid Beetle strength. He was out right after her too, far faster than she would have guessed, sprawling across the uneven paving at her feet, and Laszlo behind him, aiming a little snapbow back into the taverna and yet not loosing. She could hear yells of fear and horror from within – some of the patrons had left their exit too late. She could not force herself to go to help them. There was no helping them. Not after that moment of lost blankness when she had forgotten what she was.