Still, that was all a part of the profession. The mystery of his trade included all such situations as this. He would watch. He would learn. He would put himself through the paces of Ostrec’s life, and await opportunity.
He disposed of the body carefully and removed every spot of Shoel Jhin’s blood from himself before returning to Ostrec’s rooms.
In the morning the summons came: not from the throne but the next best thing: he and Colonel Harvang were called before General Brugan.
Once upon a time there had been a princess, and she had lived in fear…
Seda smiled at the thought, although the expression was a little tight, a little forced. Fear of her brother, yes. Fear of the Rekef general, Maxin, who had waited with a knife, ready for the order to end Seda’s life. It would be far too easy to say that her brother had been mad. He had perhaps been too sane, instead. He had seen the world very clearly indeed, and his place within it, and had recoiled from both. Most of all, he had feared death, and that was a perfectly rational thing to fear. He had lived under the shadow of the throne that he was a tenant of and a slave to, all too aware that the Empire needed the office and not the man. Indeed, her brother Alvdan had possessed few personal qualities of any real value. For that reason he had ensured that only Seda, of all his family, had survived his coronation, and that any bastards he happened to sire were put to death. He had been terrified of becoming obsolete.
He had been given a chance at immortality by the Mosquito magician, Uctebri the Sarcad, but it had been a false chance. The Mosquito had engineered his death at the hands of some magical puppet, but then Uctebri himself had been slain by the Mantis slave Tisamon, who had been hacked to death before the vacant throne by the Emperor’s furious soldiers. The ritual that Uctebri had raised, which would have made Seda his creature and given him control of the Empire, had earthed in her, stolen her Aptitude, gifted her with an expanded understanding of the world — and won her a throne.
She had been so frightened, after that, of what she had become. The world had become a distorted place where nothing worked the way she remembered. Her own mind had owned to dark cravings and lusts. Fear? She had eaten and drunk it, and slept in its company every night.
Well, we all must pass our trials. It was a part of every magical tradition, in fact. No neophyte could become a true magician without being tested, and the core of the test was to establish control over the self, without which any other form of power was but an empty shell. If only her brother had understood that.
Her chambers were as richly furnished as the Empire’s vast wealth could afford, with gold and gems, silks and furs in extravagant profusion. She had a hundred servants within earshot to attend to her every need. Some had already been busy tonight.
Her bedchamber was swathed in drapes of red and gold and deep, smouldering purple, centring on the great pillared bed. She slept alone tonight, since her current partner was recuperating. Fear again: all the Empire feared him as much as it feared her, perhaps more, but he feared her like no other thing on earth — feared and yet hungered for her, with a desire he could not stem. It amused her, but some part of her was disappointed in him. He had possessed such promise. He should have been stronger. He should have been strong enough to fight me, some small part of her whispered, to destroy me. Someone must..
Her original consort, the renegade Thalric, had been stronger, more secure in himself. She had never quite broken him, and he had fled her before she could manage it. Her thoughts still turned to him sometimes. One day you will be mine again.
In the room beyond her bedchamber lay what would seem, to the uninitiated, to be a scene of torture, the victim still fresh on the slab, pale and withered. Her appetites had been born of the powers that had transformed her. Mosquito magic was rooted in blood, physically and symbolically. She sipped at her goblet now, sampling the salt liquid as though it was a vintage, its colour smearing the red of her lips.
All around her, the Empire was on the move. Her orders had seen to that. She could not claim all the credit, though. If I went before them and preached peace, I would have another civil war on my hands. All the magic in the world could not prevent it. Her people needed to grow, and so they needed to conquer. The Consortium demanded the wealth of the Empire’s neighbours and control over their trade. Her philosophers set out their proofs that the way of the Empire was superior to that of its enemies, and that by bringing them to heel the cause of civilization would be advanced. Her armies grew sullen and restless and apt to mutiny now that the Empire’s internal conflict was done. There were a thousand reasons to go to war.
And she was proud. She would not deny that she felt a fierce love for her people and their relentless energy, the strength of their will. They had come so far, and they still had so far to go. Oh, certainly, the thinkers of Collegium, the merchants of Helleron, the artificers of the Exalsee — all of these had something to contribute to the world, but they would do so beneath a black and gold banner, in time.
She had her own reasons for conquest, though. She was Inapt. She was a magician. She had gone to Khanaphes and demanded the blessing of the ancient Masters there. She had planted her flag in a new arena, on whose sands the champions of other kinden had been fighting and dying for millennia.
Magic was not the force it once had been, atrophied and wan since the Apt revolution had overthrown or remade the old Inapt hierarchies. The Moths were now hermits in their mountain fastnesses, the Dragonflies a sprawling monarchy decaying from within, the Mantis-kinden warriors entering their twilight days, the Spiders setting aside their greater powers to rule their satrapies of slaves by manipulation and suggestion. The very Masters of Khanaphes themselves hid in the tombs they had built for themselves and there dreamt of a distant future. Only the Moths had ever sought to recreate the long-gone Days of Lore, and their attempts had ended in catastrophe.
Being reborn in blood and shadow, empowered by the might of Uctebri, by the breaking of the Shadow Box that had been the result of that failed Moth ritual, she had inherited a measure of power. Being crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes had made her a player in the old, old game of magic. Her raw strength as a magician — unearned, undeserved but undeniable — was a match for any that might challenge her, but now she found that it was not enough.
For, above and beyond the remnants of the old Inapt powers, there was always the other.
‘Tisamon,’ she called, and the faintest grating of metal announced that he was with her.
Mere strength would not bow the magical world to her will, nor would all the armed might of her armies. She could obliterate whole Inapt kinden if she wanted, and it would avail her nought if she had not exacted their recognition, their fealty, first.
He was her greatest triumph to date, Tisamon. Her court knew him only as the captain of her bodyguard — those half-dozen Mantis-kinden sent to her by the Moths of Tharn as a gift, who now served her with a selfless loyalty that the Tharen had never intended. They had originally been six, now they were seven, but it was unhealthy to comment on it, just as it was unhealthy for the overly informed to note that their new captain bore the same name as the Mantis slave that had figured so prominently in the former Emperor’s death.
What the old Inapt powers had lost in strength they had preserved in skill and application. All the power in the world was useless without precision. The Moths could use the little they had with a finesse that would outmanoeuvre her brute force. As her Empire needed to grow and develop, so did she.
She had called to him, to Tisamon, using his discarded blade as a focus, spilling the blood of a bastard cousin, building him a body of ancient Mantis armour. It had been her first true ritual, the greatest exercise of her nascent authority. She had sought out his ghost and bound it inside the metal, and exacted its oath. Now that tall figure of mail stepped towards her, halting at her elbow, not quite touching, and she felt the faint, cool breath from within his helm. And would any of those old powers have dared do what I have, to bring him back so? She had cast down the gauntlet, in her own mind at least.