He was not sure that he could possibly give an unbiased account of that. As she had drawn close, he had felt a pressure inside his skull, inexplicable here in the mechanistic Empire, reminiscent of times past when great Moth-kinden Skryres had turned their arts upon him. Then she had entered the room.
He was a past master at his trade, of keeping the inner man and the outer face separate, showing nothing of who and what he was and living the life of the other. When she strode in, though, he had not been able to keep still. The sheer sight and sense of her had shocked him like a spear through the chest.
She had glanced at him then, and he had fought, physically fought, to keep his wards and masks intact, because some primal part of him had been clamouring for him to fall to his knees and confess all.
Even now he could not say whether he had escaped undetected. He did not know what senses she had inherited, or what subtlety in using them. The Rekef might come for him any moment, turning on one seemingly of their own without the least stab of conscience. Even now she might have him dragged before her.
Power had radiated from her in waves, enough to blast aside his false face and leave him naked and terrified before her splendour. She had been as difficult to look at as the sun, for those first few moments, until his inner eyes had adjusted. Above her brow there had seemed a burning brand, a diadem of invisible but inescapable authority.
What his briefing had given him was the name of a well-placed servant who was also an Arcanum agent — an elderly Grasshopper who had served in Capitas for over a decade, feeding information back to the Moths in shreds and pieces for all that time. Any other spy would have been uncovered by now, but the old man was subtle, and the Moths had never acted on any of it, only hoarded it against the future, as they always did.
After dark, Esmail had left his room in the extensive complex that Harvang and his Rekef adherents called their own, stalking across the rooftops with a stealth that Ostrec the Wasp had never possessed, then hunting down his informant, a shadow with a Wasp’s shape, until he found the single cramped room that the Grasshopper shared with a half-dozen others.
The man’s name was Shoel Jhin, and he was a magician of very minor sorts, whose powers would no doubt have eroded during his long slavery here. Esmail himself was no great conjuror — the elements of his trade relied on control and elegance of manipulation rather than raw power — but he had a few magus’s tricks, and it was a simple matter to put his voice in Jhin’s mind and hiss out the man’s name until he awoke, starting and staring: then to call him out of the room, out of the servants’ block, until he met the old man face to face within the cold walls of a wine cellar.
Now he stared down at that lined face, the sallow skin bagged and creased with care and age. ‘You’re a poor spy or a lax one. Don’t you realize there was something missing from your reports?’
‘I tell what I tell. What they tell you is another matter,’ Jhin wheezed.
Ostrec wanted to beat him for his insubordination. Esmail could feel rage emanating from the image of the man he kept in his head, the source of his mimicry. ‘I came here to spy on a Wasp, one of the Apt,’ he said, in more measured tones. ‘An Empress, yes, and we all know the power that attaches to such symbols, but it’s not a power that she should be able to tap. I’ve never…’ He stopped, shaking his head. ‘I have never felt such a presence.’
Shoel Jhin was watching him, beady eyes nesting in wrinkles examining the spy’s false face. ‘Help you, they said. Educate you, no. They tell you what they tell you. Not my place, not my place at all.’
Esmail still held the man by his collar but now he let go, stepping back, suppressing Ostrec’s borrowed anger. It occurred to him that the old man did not know who he was, not really — oh, a spy, yes, and one of that very select and mercurial order, but no more than that. Just some Moth, probably, was Jhin’s guess.
Esmail stepped back from him. ‘Tell me,’ he urged softly.
Jhin actually cackled a little. ‘Not my place,’ he repeated, and made to walk past him.
He stopped, for Esmail had fixed him with a look, Ostrec’s pale eyes holding an expression neither Wasp nor Moth ever had. Esmail let the mask slip slightly, letting out some sense of what hid behind: the villain of ages, the murderer-kinden, the lost race.
The old Grasshopper stayed very still, on the brink of a revelation he plainly had no wish for. ‘You… you…’ he whispered. The assassins, the killers of the old times, but no, but surely no — they’re gone, all of them, and the Moths were ever their enemies… Esmail could all but read the thoughts coursing through the old man’s head.
‘They send who they send,’ he said, pointedly.
Shoel Jhin bared his yellowed teeth. ‘You think it will help, even that?’ he started to say, but Esmail hissed out, ‘Just tell me!’ forcing the man back with his stare until Jhin’s shoulderblades were against the cold wall again.
‘The Emperor… Alvdan…’
‘He died, yes,’ Esmail confirmed. And the circumstances of that seem confused, as well — far more going on than some Mantis slave getting lucky but, as with every other damned thing, the Moths never tell the whole story, even to their own agents.
‘She changed, after he died.’
‘She became Empress. That’s liable to change you,’ Esmail pointed out impatiently. ‘Give me specifics.’
Jhin closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘The Emperor’s death.. a Mantis Weaponsmaster and a Mosquito-kinden Sarcad. You know these traditions? Shadow and blood. The Emperor died to magic, the first man in five hundred years to die in such a particular way. But it all went wrong. The power, the greatest ritual since the Days of Lore, all on her shoulders: the inheritrix of two traditions. Changed her? Oh it changed her all right, and she knew it full well. She must have learned too much from that Mosquito…’ Jhin’s eyes shone with an unhealthy light. ‘They began disappearing, soon after the coronation. Servants, mostly, some prisoners, some of the Wasps even. Nobody knew or nobody was telling, but I could feel it through the walls sometimes. The blood, the power.’
‘She’s Inapt,’ Esmail concluded. ‘She’s a magician even.’ Untutored, unskilled, newly come to some semblance of power? ‘No, that’s not it.’
Now it was him who was discomfited, by Jhin’s gaze. ‘So last year she went to Khanaphes. You know that city?’
An old name, old enough to make the clash between the Moths and Esmail’s people look like recent history. Khanaphes. There had been power there, but the Moths did not speak of the place much, which told Esmail volumes. Older and more powerful than their kinden, then. Their seniors, already gone senile and into decline as the Moths were climbing up. But not decayed quite enough, for the Empress Seda had gone there, added that backwater to her Empire, and there…
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What did she do?’
But Jhin was grinning now. ‘She was crowned. Can you not see the mark on her? She was made their heir, and if she is crude with her power, just you wait and see! Don’t you understand? She’ll bring it all back, turn back the glass and give us everything we’ve lost.’
‘You’re mad,’ Esmail snapped at him.
‘Me? You’re the one who’s going to try and stop her!’ And abruptly Shoel Jhin had a blade out, a wretched little knife that a servant might palm while passing through the kitchens. He was ancient, arthritic, no conceivable threat to Esmail or Ostrec, but he was laughing even as he lunged.
The spy slipped aside without effort, striking back barehanded along the length of the old man’s arm, his fingers shearing into the slave’s rib-cage, then ripping his heart apart at a touch. He could have stopped himself, but he made a considered judgement, in the fraction of a second given to him, that nothing more of value would come from Shoel Jhin.
Turned, he reflected thoughtfully. An Arcanum agent turned, and by the woman’s mere being. I am in a bad place, and I have not been told what I need to know in order to survive.