‘Mistress te Mosca, you’re called to the Assembly. All the Masters are,’ he announced, slightly out of breath.
‘But I don’t even have a seat on the Assembly,’ Sartaea protested. ‘Really, I’m not a full Master of the College. I don’t feel that I should be involved in-’
‘All College staff, they said,’ the student interrupted. ‘Please, Mistress. The Imperial ambassador has asked for special dispensation to speak to the city.’
A dead silence fell across the studio, each and everyone there staring at the messenger. In the echo of that sudden quiet, Raullo Mummers hooked back the curtain of his alcove and looked out, blinking and unshaven, as though the news’ sheer significance had been enough to slap him into immediate wakefulness.
‘I see,’ said Sartaea te Mosca, with considerable self-possession. ‘Well, then, I suppose I should go and listen to what the ambassador has to say.’
The Imperial ambassador was named Aagen, and he was a complex man who had only ever wanted a simple life. He had been an engineer, once, just a lieutenant whose life was mostly shouting at other engineers to get things fixed and machines into the air or on the road. He had even been well liked. One of the people who had liked him had ended up sleeping with the Empress, albeit briefly, and in his brief moment of power he had got Aagen sent to Collegium as an ambassador. It had been intended as a reward.
True, Aagen had enjoyed his time here, up until now. The Beetles knew a great deal about artificing, and they were remarkably open about it, even to a Wasp, when that Wasp displayed the same childlike enthusiasm for the craft that they did. He had lived here a few years now, and had not done too badly from it.
Right now, he would take it all back to be a lowly lieutenant again, as he stood before the Assembly of Collegium, although the lowly lieutenant he had once been would have seen this task merely as a duty and blithely ignored the wider repercussions. The Aagen of today, Ambassador Aagen, could not close his eyes so easily.
He had fallen in love, that was the problem. Long before being posted here he had fallen in love with a dancing slave, and loved her enough to free her and send her out of his life. After that, nothing about the Empire or the rest of the world had ever looked quite the same to him.
He had been greeted just after dawn by Honory Bellowern, Beetle-kinden, Imperial diplomat and the man who held Aagen’s leash. The portly, avuncular man had beamed at him. ‘Big day today, ambassador.’ Aagen’s heart had sunk in direct proportion to the man’s cheer.
Bellowern had held out a scroll neatly tied with black tape, his habit for official Imperial statements. It had taken a few moments of blank staring before Aagen had been able to accept it from him.
‘I’ve made all the arrangements. Of course the Speaker will make time for the words of the Empress,’ Bellowern had explained happily. ‘In fact, I rather think that there will be more people there to hear you than have turned up since… oh, the last war, let’s say.’
Now, Aagen looked out at that sea of faces and knew that Bellowern had not been exaggerating. Surely the entire Assembly had jostled its way into the great amphitheatre of the Amphiophos, and there were plenty standing at the back, too: senior scholars, Assembly clerks, servants. They were all unnaturally quiet. He had sat here before and listened to members of this politic host shout themselves hoarse, while two-score separate conversations were carried on all around them. Now they just listened gravely, finally finding the decorum and dignity that their office should have always borne, and never had until now.
All those dark faces, he thought, for they were mostly Beetles, with a scattering of other kinden thrown in, mostly at the College end. He tried to picture a similar gathering of his own people, but found that the thought only oppressed him. He felt that he had more in common, under the skin, with these mercantile, machine-minded folk than with his own warlike kinden.
He cleared his throat. They were rapt. The unspoken tension and worry in the room sang in his ears.
When he had first read his orders in Bellowern’s office he had demanded of Bellowern, ‘When did this happen?’
‘Probably happening even as we speak, my dear ambassador,’ had come the reply. ‘Now just do your job. I have appointments later.’
‘And what do I say to Stenwold Maker?’ Aagen had demanded, as his last line of defence, for he knew that even Bellowern was leery of clashing head-on with the War Master.
But the Beetle had been unflappable. ‘Why, haven’t you heard? Master Maker’s out of the city on some sort of clandestine business.’ A chuckle. ‘My agents think he’s gone to Myna.’
And that had been that.
‘The words of the Empress, Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First,’ Aagen began, falling back on his battlefield voice despite the quiet, for the reassurance it gave him. ‘Be it known that the Empire has suffered, both before and after its unification, from incursions and raids from neighbouring states thinking to take advantage of our internal division.’ He was surprised at how steady his tones were. ‘Be it also known that the Empire’s protectorates within the Commonweal, known as the Principalities, have also come under assault by the forces of these same aggressive neighbours. After attempting every manner of reconciliation and being met only with contempt, it is the sad duty of a state to defend itself by any means. So it is that the difficult decision has been made, by the Empress acting under the advice of her court, that the Empire is henceforth at war with the self-styled Three-city Alliance, which war shall be prosecuted by all means until the borders of the Empire are secure, and the liberty of its allies is won.’ He paused then, waiting for the uproar, and indeed there was a murmur building, but not the grand outcry he had half expected.
‘The Empress wishes it known,’ he continued more quietly, ‘that this is no breach of the Treaty of Gold, but the simple need of any state to defend its own. The Empire does not consider that this conflict need involve any other city. However,’ and Bellowern had actually written it that way, stage-managing the speech through the weapons of punctuation, ‘should any other power declare for the Alliance, or aid them in any way, then the Empire will regard such interference as an act of war, and the perpetrators as enemies of the Empress and the Wasp people, and the Empire shall not rest until such enemies are rendered incapable of threatening the Empire’s security and peace of mind.’
When he rolled the scroll up again it was the loudest sound in the entire grand chamber.
He was expected to return to the ambassadorial quarters for debriefing after that, leaving the talk to build into a panicked babble in his absence. Instead, he headed straight for an airfield, where a blocky old Imperial heliopter sat waiting for him.
Shortly thereafter he had left the city, and the post of ambassador, behind him, and Honory Bellowern would rant and storm and cuff the servants, jolted from his mild-mannered act for once by this shock desertion. Aagen did not care. He had learned too much, travelled too far from the lieutenant he had once been. With the sense that behind him the world was cracking apart, he was fleeing to the only person who really mattered to him any more.
Banjacs Gripshod knew what people said about him. He was bitterly aware that his name had passed into Collegiate legend as a byword for bad artifice, so that students characterized a catastrophically failed experiment as ‘banjacsed’, without really understanding where the word had come from. It had been thirty years since he had been dismissed ignominiously from the Great College, and not a day had passed without his feeling keenly just how badly he had been treated.
He was old now, probably one of the oldest Beetle-kinden in the city, and most of those who did remember that there was a man behind the myth assumed he was dead. His own family, nephews and nieces and subsequent generations, would have nothing to do with him, preferring to dote on his younger brother, Berjek, historian and now apparently some manner of diplomat.