‘Master . . .’ If a little reverence had crept into her voice, she felt she could be forgiven.
‘Ah, no,’ he said gently, ‘not “Master”, not from you. We are ill met in this benighted place, but I know a crowned head when I see it. But we must leave here. Please, come with me.’ He levered himself upright again. ‘No place here is truly safe, but at least I will take you away from the Worm.’
Eight
Capitas was filled to bursting with soldiers. The entire Imperial war machine was on the move, and the Third Army and elements of the First were thronging the streets, trying to resupply while waiting for their orders.
To General Brugan, watching from the Imperial palace, it all had a random, mindless air to it, the mad scurrying of insects whose nest has been turned over. He had a horrible feeling of doubt in his own perceptions. Was it always like that, and I just fooled myself that I could see any patterns?
He was the general of the almighty Rekef. He had plotted and schemed for it, done away with rivals, raised conspiracies. He should have been the most powerful man in the Empire, with the Empress under his complete control. That had been the plan.
Yet he could not have guessed what the Empress was. Even now he did not know, save that she was not human, not natural. When she looked at him, or thought of him in a certain way, he loved her, lusted after her. When she forgot about him, he found some place out of her sight and lived in dread of the moment that his name would enter her mind again. None of it made any sense.
He wanted to be mad. If he was mad, and it was all his own madness, then at least that would leave the rest of the world sane. But he knew it was true and he was sane, and everything he had ever believed in now made as little sense as the scurrying of the soldiers below.
She had been gone for a while: some whim of hers taking her westwards to where the Eighth had been fighting. She had not told him why, and he had not dared ask, where once he would have demanded. For some short time his life had been his own, even though the Red Watch men strode through the palace with decrees somehow direct from the Empress’s mouth. He believed that as well. He was becoming painfully adept at believing the impossible.
And now she was back, and it had all started again. Half the time he felt that even his own body was somehow running his commands to it past the Empress before allowing him to move his limbs.
Last night she had sent for him again. The lovemaking had been hard enough, torn between the helpless need she generated in him and her own hunger that devoured another part of him every night they grappled together. Afterwards, though, when he had lain exhausted and blood-dashed by her side, there had been no sleep. He had trembled and clenched his eyes shut, hands to his ears as Seda, Empress of all the Wasps, fought with her own nightmares.
There had never been nightmares until her return. Whatever she had done, whatever had been done to her, it had ended badly. Before her journey, she had been the cool, fierce Empress that the Wasps had grown to love: ruthless, elegant and deadly. Now Brugan alone was witness to something new, an undermining of her nature. As she slept, she twitched and cried out, moaned in horror, screamed sometimes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she had said, last night. Words he had never thought to hear from those lips.
And all through it, the coupling and the torment, her bodyguard Tisamon had watched on, silent and menacing, in the very same room. She would not be parted from the man. Or from whatever lurked within that metal shell.
‘General!’
He turned sharply to recognize General Marent of the Third Army. The man looked angry, and it was unthinkable that anyone could address Brugan with so little respect. A Rekef rank overrode a regular army one, as everyone knew. Brugan should draw himself up and stare the man down, enforce his indomitable will on this jumped-up infantryman.
He reached into himself for that certainty and self-possession he had known of old, but it had rusted under the Empress’s caustic regard, leaving nothing for him to draw on.
‘What is it, Marent?’ he asked, horrified to hear a trembling in his own voice.
The army general’s eyes widened, and Brugan saw that he would far rather have been shouted at, dismissed, threatened even, because that was the way the world worked. He had come looking for reassurance, and had found only Brugan.
Marent had been a battlefield colonel whose record during the revolt of the traitor governors was such that the choice was either to promote the man or to have him disappear. Right now Brugan was wishing it had been the latter. Marent seemed to storm through life constantly angry with the inefficiencies of everyone and everything else, but that resentment had never quite dared to light upon his superiors until now.
‘My Third is still sitting idle, General,’ the man reported. ‘We were supposed to head for the front two tendays back, but the quartermasters have been feeding me excuses, I haven’t any Engineer Corps, siege train or air support, and today . . .’ His hands were clenched into fists at his sides as the man forcibly restrained himself. ‘Today your cursed Red Watch comes to me—!’
‘They’re not my Red Watch!’ Brugan’s words were supposed to match the man in rage and volume, but there was a terribly plaintive edge to them he could not control. ‘They take orders from the Empress – only the Empress.’
‘So they said,’ spat Marent. ‘And so I asked for an audience with her, to hear it from her own lips. The Empress—’
‘The Empress is not seeing anyone,’ Brugan finished for him. Not true. She sees me. Oh, she sees me.
‘And so I have nonsensical orders to sit here, with thirty thousand men clogging every barracks and garrison and camped outside the gates, without even the basics of a support corps. Because – and I quote – I “may be needed”. What is that supposed to mean, General?’
‘It means you may be needed,’ Brugan replied hollowly. ‘If she says it, that is what she means. Don’t question her.’
Marent stared at him, and for a terrible moment Brugan thought some kind of pity would fight its way onto the man’s blunt features. ‘What is going on?’ Marent demanded. ‘Is this what we fought the traitors for? Orders that make no sense, commands from the throne that are vaguer than an Inapt prophecy –’ if he saw Brugan’s twitch at that, he did not let it slow him – ‘a war on two fronts, for no reason that anyone’s saying. And the Eighth . . . how did the Sarnesh destroy the Eighth so thoroughly, Brugan? What aren’t they telling me?’
He was so self-righteous, buoyed by his own war record and his youth, that Brugan should destroy him, remind him of the Rekef’s power, break him for the sheer disloyalty of even questioning the way things were.
But he’s right, the Rekef general knew. He could only shake his head, sagging against the stone rail of the balcony, whilst beyond him the city bustled and struggled in a hundred different directions, and achieved nothing.
‘What happened to you?’ Marent said, his voice at last losing its anger in the face of the inexplicable, but Brugan only shook his head further and turned away.
Wasps lost their tempers, it was well known. Every officer had been forced to discipline soldiers who let that temper fly. Every occupied city had learned the dark side of Wasp temperament, to tread carefully and not provoke the Lords of Empire. Each Wasp conquest had paid for its resistance in killings and rape after having sparked the frustration of the invaders. Few from outside the Empire realized the amount of effort that went into directing and controlling that innate rage, from their rigid upbringings to the Imperial expansion itself, a constant channel for a kinden unwilling to be idle and quick to take offence, and whose every adult member could deal death through their Art.