‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘I saw you in Che’s mind, back in her past. I know you were a friend of hers. When she sent me back here, when she sent me out, I don’t think she could dictate where I went but . . . there is meaning.’
‘Or your bad luck.’
She shrugged. ‘You Apt believe the world is so random, and so you build your machines to control as much of it as possible. To me, there is so little actual chance in the world. Its patterns are capable of prediction, and so it is not a matter of controlling so much as planning ahead.’
That came so close to making sense to Totho that he just nodded and let her continue.
‘She sent me here to you,’ Maure concluded. ‘What else is there? Not to Khanaphes, not to Collegium, not to the Commonweal where she and I met. No – here, to you. The line that connects the two of you was strong enough to guide me.’
‘There is no line, not any more,’ Totho announced harshly.
He saw her expression, clearly wanting to speak but fearful of doing so, and waved her words on.
‘Only if you promise not to shoot me.’
‘I won’t shoot you.’
‘I am a necromancer. I can see the ghosts that haunt people, that hang about them – both the dead and the living. I look at you and I see Che there, right there.’ And he actually looked around to where she pointed, craning past his pauldron to see what was so very evident to this woman.
He did have a brief moment of wanting to shoot her then, if only to eradicate this incomprehensible knot that his life was caught in. The realization that he had nothing else left, that the knot was the one thing holding him from plunging into the abyss, stayed his hand.
Nineteen
She tried to tell them, truly she did.
Yes, she was Empress of the Wasps, and her word was law, transmitted by her own mouth or by those of her Red Watch. She was entitled to command, and indeed the entire structure of the Empire was set up for that specific purpose. Nevertheless she had felt a burning need to communicate her reasons for what she was telling them to do.
For I do not wish to be remembered as . . . but there were no words to express how they might remember her. Long after her death, her name would be a byword for atrocity unless she could make them understand how right, how necessary, this whole desperate endeavour was.
So she had called them all to her audience chambers, where she sat on her throne before them with Tisamon’s louring presence at her side. The great powers of the Empire had all been represented there. She had summoned General Brugan of the Rekef and General Lien of the Engineers. She had called in Marent of the army and the magnates of the Consortium. She had spoken the names of the luminaries of the Quartermasters and the Slave Corps, and of course they had come as swiftly as they could. Nobody wanted to disappoint the Empress.
There, in the very hub of her power, where she was strongest, she had confronted them. She had worked it all out beforehand, what she would say. She would tell them the truth. They were the Empire, her people, so the truth was something she owed them.
She would tell them it alclass="underline" the secret histories and the hidden worlds and the terrible deeds done at the dawn of time. ‘There was a war,’ she would say, for at least they would understand that much. She would detail who that war had been against, not even deigning to mask her intentions behind the derogatory label of ‘the Worm’.
She would stand before them and tell them how all the powers of the old world had gathered together to defeat that ancient enemy, and how it had then been sealed away, locked beyond the world, until now.
Her own guilt in its eventual release she would not describe – they did not need to know – only that it was out now, and must be put back in its place.
After that, she had planned to explain precisely the draconian measures that were now their only chance. It had all made such perfect sense to her, regardless of the blood that would be on all their hands once it was done – blood enough to make even a general flinch. They would at least know that the ends justified those or any other means.
When they had come at her call, to throng her chambers with as great a gathering of Imperial power as the world had seen in many a year, she had stood, faced them and drawn breath. She had looked upon their faces, and touched the hard stones of their minds.
Her words had dried up in her throat.
What she had seen there was ignorance. It was not the sort of ignorance that could be educated out of them: they had been born with it, a birthright passed down through the blood of every Wasp save for her. Looking at all those respectful expectant faces, she had abruptly seen herself as they saw her – and as they would also see her once she had finished her earnest recounting.
They would nod, and bow, and be the abject servants of the throne, and then they would leave. And they would think that she was mad.
The truth of her words – she would speak nothing to them but truth – would curdle into fiction in their ears and in their minds. The grinding mills of their Aptitude would take it in and churn out nothing but scrap for them. And they would murmur to each other that their Empress was insane. And after that perhaps some of them would laugh at her. And, however hard she strove to root out such mirth, she would still hear their laughter. That kind of humour spread like a disease.
For the first time since taking the throne, Seda stared her Empire in the eye and was the one to look away first. She could bear many things, but she found that the mockery of her people was not one of them. Let them hate her; let them fear her; only let them not laugh.
And so, before that great host of the mighty, she had simply given out a handful of uncompromising instructions, baffling in their scope and intent, and let them wonder. Even then there was a miasma of doubt hanging about the room as they thought: All this, just for that? They did not understand her, and the distance between them was only growing wider. Even her own Red Watch could not follow her to the terrible places she was forced to walk.
Straessa the Antspider ducked back, a snapbow bolt striking stone dust near her face. By now she reckoned there were far fewer Wasps scattered amongst the buildings of this village than there were solid Collegiate company soldiers at her back, but the Wasps had been very inventive in picking their shooting positions.
And they said I shouldn’t be leading this sort of thing any more. And I didn’t listen, worse luck.
It was just a little satellite village on the rail line, but the Wasps had obviously picked it as a good place to inconvenience the expeditionary force; no doubt there were all sorts of explosive surprises planned, and so a punitive force had been sent in to root them out. Straessa had vaguely expected to find barricades and a shooting line, but the Wasps had spread out their force and were using the buildings themselves as their cover, making every step into the open a potential last one.