Because it’s my fault. I let them out. I must force them back.
But I must be right. I must be sure. Better to go too far than not far enough. I have no time for subtlety.
From the corner of the room, Tisamon watched her impassively, and she strode over to him, trying to read condemnation in his face – trying to read anything in his face. His pale dead features regarded her and did not judge. He was her creature, and he was the only one she could rely on. The rest – her generals, Brugan, all of them – they were mortal, fallible, weak. She must make use of them, for want of any better, but they were all poor tools. How is it that my people have come to this?
Once she stepped from her chambers, her anguish and desperation were left behind. She was the Empress; people bowed before her and feared her.
In her throne room she dismissed the waiting suitors and advisers and petitioners, all the detritus of state. She spared time only for her Red Watch, spread as it was across the Empire and beyond. In her mind she moved it as she would chess pieces, each member with its particular instructions and mandates coming to its mind inexplicably but irresistibly. It was her voice. That was no idle boast.
After that she summoned a handful of Consortium officers, men of the Quartermaster Corps and veteran slavers, those to whom she had entrusted the minutiae of her plan. None of them truly understood what this was all for and, though of course they did not question her, she suspected they did not even ask questions of themselves. If the Empress wanted an unprecedented concentration of slaves, whole camps crammed full of the luckless Inapt, then why should that raise an eyebrow, beyond the intellectual exercise of arranging the logistics?
They reported to her patiently and carefully, checking their numbers with each other. They confirmed that every airship of any size that the Empire could make use of had been diverted; that vessels crammed with the spoils of the war with the Spiderlands were coasting north up the Silk Road; that the Principalities were selling off their Dragonfly serfs with an open hand; that the Grasshopper-kinden of Sa had been culled, a full one in four currently on forced march towards Capitas. They spoke dispassionately about death rates: those who would not make the camps because of the pace or the overcrowding. They were regretful but only because such waste diminished the value of their service to her.
And she sat and listened to those dry voices, these men whose only war had been fought on paper, or against an enemy already in chains, and she felt a spasm of revulsion go through her that she should need such men, and that she should need this venture.
They will remember me as the mad Empress. History will never forgive me. Even though we win, history cannot condone what it is we do here. But I pay that price, and I make all these others pay that price. To save the world.
Put in those words, it sounded almost convincing.
‘It’s not enough.’
The words were hers. She could not deny them.
To save a world from the Worm, great sacrifices would have to be made. The Inapt made better gifts to oblivion, but she could not afford to restrict her ambitions. The Apt were still valuable to her, and she had far more of them still at her disposal. Entire cities full of them, if need be. Even if it took ten Apt deaths to equal one of the Inapt, why then, she would just find some place with Apt to spare, and have ten times as many killed.
‘Your Imperial Majesty,’ one of the Consortium men began, ‘forgive us. There are limits to what even the resources of the Empire may accomplish in so short a time. And there is the matter of feeding the slaves at the camps, keeping them alive for . . .?’ His small eyes searched her face for some indication of that ‘for. . .?’
And indeed, although she herself knew what for, how could she possibly accomplish it? She could hardly haul each one in turn to the museum for a ritual bloodletting. Could she ask Tisamon to pass amongst so many thousands to cut their throats? Even he – even being what he now was – would take too long about the task. And that was just the camps themselves. She had heard their reports regarding the numbers they were gathering. Surely that would not be enough, for the colossal hubris of the ritual that she was planning. Even the ancient Moths would not have dared what she was intending. The power she would require was unprecedented. Only an unprecedented toll would pay for it.
I could have my soldiers shoot them. Why not turn to the weapons of the Apt one last time? The blood would still flow, and it would be quicker. It could be effected with all the efficiency of these modern times.
But even then . . . and how many am I relying on to follow such orders? Too many, surely. And they would fight back, the Inapt slaves, and a city of the Apt even more so. Can I be sure that such bloodletting is possible, even with every soldier in the Empire at my bidding?
Do I even need the blood? Is that not simply an antiquated concept of savage peoples? What is blood, after all, but a symbol for the real power: death.
Death is all I need.
She dismissed them, the entire pack of them, exhorting them to double their efforts, and for a while she brooded, seated on the throne with only Tisamon for company.
Then she beckoned a servant close.
‘Bring me General Lien,’ she directed.
The Engineers had done so much for the Empire in recent years. Perhaps they would come to its rescue again.
When General Marent returned to Capitas from his unexpected trip to Collegium, he could readily ignore all those questions that inferior ranks dared ask of an army general. The only voices he would truly have to answer to were the Rekef and the Empress, and neither sent for him. General Brugan was seen less and less at the palace, so that some were beginning to say he was a spent force, and the Empress . . . The Empress was fixated on her own concerns, rumour of which was now rife across Capitas. She had a grand project, it seemed, but the more her people found out about it, the less they understood.
What could she need so many slaves for? Most assumed there would be some elaborate entertainment once the war was done, though even the optimists murmured that surely victory was not so imminent as all that. Others wondered at the creation of some new all-Auxillian army to throw against the Lowlanders, some hundred-thousand-strong suicide detachment in a vast war of attrition.
Marent waded through the questions of his inferiors without deigning to engage, brushing them aside before returning to his troops. Against the fact of a general jaunting across half the world without orders, nobody bothered enquiring as to why he had brought a Captain-Auxillian of Engineers back with him.
Ernain had orders signed by Major Oski to seek out parts and mechanical supplies because that had always been a beloved dodge of the Engineers to enable them to go wherever they liked at a moment’s notice. He would have preferred having Oski at his side as he stepped onto the Capitas airfield, but the Second Army’s chief engineer was not as free to skip about the world as General Marent.
The Vesseretti Bee-kinden had been the Empire’s first major conquest. That meant that by now they were everywhere: Auxillian soldiers, house slaves, Consortium men, labourers. A sturdy-framed and hard-working people, with a good grasp of all the Apt world had to offer, they were valued by the Wasps for their skill and industry. They fetched high prices, and as soldiers were often promoted to the lower ranks. The Wasps had almost forgotten the savage struggle their grandfathers had gone through to subdue the Bee city.