‘We record them as true.’ Gjegevey ventured a smile. ‘Of course we record many, hm, fantastical things as true, but those conflicts were real. There is evidence.’
She remained silent a long time, after that, where he had expected her either to press for more details or to pass on to some other subject. She was not reading, either. The book beneath her hands passed unnoticed.
At last she said, ‘Gjegevey… there were other conflicts.’
‘Many,’ he agreed, ‘and in all, ehm, probability many that even my people did not record. The past is a deep well, and in those days there were ways to drive an enemy to the very edge of oblivion, even..’ He stuttered to a halt, for she was staring at him intently.
‘Yes…?’ she prompted.
He shrugged as if to suggest he had been merely rambling, that she should pay no heed.
Without looking, her quick hands turned pages until she was near the end of the book’s legible section. The pages there were water-marked, worm-eaten and frayed. ‘What is this, then? For, of all things in this overwritten textbook, this has no legend, no explanation. Just one symbol on a page, and yet I feel…’
She stopped, for Gjegevey had drawn away. His face was always pale, and now discoloured by the lamplight, but she would swear that he had become even more ashen, and something leapt within her breast.
‘The Seal of the Worm,’ he whispered on the edge of hearing, as though against his will. She sensed him struggling with himself, read his mind, almost, seeing him weighing whether he could convince her that it was nothing, just some scholar’s idle sketch.
‘Yes,’ he admitted at last, reluctantly, ‘you have found the edges of a hole that the Moths have eaten through history in order to erase an ancient foe. But, Majesty, hear me. If you ever valued my counsel, if you ever thought me wise, look no further in that direction, I beg you.’ His voice had changed, lost its vague mannerisms, become like a sword. She actually drew back from him, from this new, changed creature.
On the page before her, the symbol, a crooked spiral hatched with a hundred tiny lines, seemed to writhe.
‘I shall consider the matter,’ she said, and knew it to be at least a partial acquiescence. She closed the book. She had read enough for one day.
Esmail planned his route carefully so that he had some distance between himself and the Imperial Museum, when he first came in sight of it, viewing it down a long gas-lit avenue lined with grand buildings, factora and offices of the various divisions of the Wasp administration. The museum itself was almost finished, its shape an awkward compromise between aesthetic and functional. The usual ziggurat shape the Wasps preferred — stone copies of the hill forts their ancestors had lived in — had been expanded outward in wings, to allow sufficient space within for all the anticipated exhibits.
A shadow fell on his heart as he saw it. That was the only way he could describe the sensation to himself. He had not seen the building before, his path had not brought him here, but not until now did he realize that some part of him had been avoiding it.
Power. In a city of the Apt, the sense was weak, but someone had been eroding away at the heavy hand of disbelief that held the rest of the city in thrall. Esmail was willing to bet that there would be little of the new to be found, within those walls — no complex artifice in the lighting, no machines, no Imperial efficiency — just hall after hall devoted to the subjugated, and so many of them Inapt. The vast bulk of Capitas’s populace would be blind and deaf to it, but Esmail could almost see a brooding cloud hanging over the place. Power indeed, and of no sort that was healthy to be around.
Although, now I consider it, is any of it healthy? The Dragonfly-kinden, perhaps, but is that why their magic has atrophied so much, even by modern standards, until their great and ancient state is nothing but an eggshell ready for crushing? The Moths know: the light of the sun is for the Apt. We cannot bear its touch any more. We need doubt and fear and shadows. That is where the magic endures.
Doubt and fear and shadows practically shrouded the Imperial Museum.
Still, a summons from the Empress could not be ignored. I must trust to my skills. Beginning the long walk towards that looming edifice, he shored up the walls of his mind like a lord looking over the defences of his fortress, ensuring that the inner Esmail and the outer Ostrec were in alignment, so that everything he did, everything he thought, would he filtered only through that stolen persona.
If she suspects… But he was counting on her not being able to apply her great power with the precision that piercing his mask would require.
All too soon, the great doorway of the museum stood before him. There were no guards, which he knew must be unusual. He guessed that, for nights such as this when the Empress was in residence, the fewer witnesses the better.
He shivered, but it was Ostrec’s shiver as well. A little nervousness here would not be out of place, save only that it would not simply be acting.
He went inside.
The entrance hall was devoted to the Wasps’ own savage past, which they had contrived to make appear as ancient as the crumbling cities of the Nem. Esmail knew well that three generations back the Wasps had been living that savagery; indeed, they had barely tamed it even now, and the North-Empire still had its share of feuding hill tribes chafing at Capitas’s leash. Here were the ranked spears and tattered banners of the tribes that Seda’s grandfather had subjugated along the road to Empire. Here was the old armour, just leather and wood and chitin, but the banded construction presaging the shape of things to come. The impression was one of fecund and violent exuberance. The Wasps may have distanced themselves from that past, but they romanticized it as well. Stories set in those days of the fierce and the free were all the rage, just now.
There was no sign of Seda or any other living soul, and he passed on between the serried ranks of barbarism into the next chamber. Here, guttering lamps lit the spoils of the Twelve-year War. The walls were sheathed in screens and tapestries and woven silk depicting idylls of the Commonweal, and now the hill-tribe savagery gave way to simple tragedy: ranks and ranks of enamelled armour, the chitin and fine mail of Dragonfly princes and nobles, their bright colours muted in the dim light. Here were their incomparable bows, their narrow-headed spears, their long-hafted swords. Here — and Esmail paused, despite himself, to study it — was a map of some engagement or other, with tiny wooden soldiers standing in their battalions, demonstrating the invincibility of the Imperial war machine. A plaque explained that every single figure on both sides had been carved by Commonweal slave artisans. Esmail nodded: it fitted what he understood of the Empire and its cruel poetry. It fitted the Commonweal, too, for the slaves had plainly poured into those tiny symbols of their own defeat all the artistry and skill that they would have expended on a tribute to their own lords and ladies. For a moment he had a sudden rending sense of loss, wondering where his wife was, whether their children were safe, whether he would ever see them again.
When he looked up, she was there, the Empress Seda, flanked by two Mantis-kinden women in Imperial colours, clawed gauntlets ready to hand.
‘Ah, Estrec,’ she said, and the blood froze in his veins. She knows. She’s unmasked me already. For a moment he was in mad turmoil within his mind, and only the automatic mettle of his long training kept Ostrec’s face and form in place. He could not vouch for his expression, but Ostrec himself, discovered unexpectedly by his Empress in that place, would have lost something of his composure too.
She does not know, he insisted to himself. Seda approached him, smiling, her eyes seeming to pierce wherever they rested.