I will never be free of her unless I destroy her, and to destroy her I must acquire strength.
Where is Gjegevey?
She kicked her way out of bed angrily, shouting for the servants, who entered reluctantly. Being a body servant to Empress Seda was an uncertain prospect. To the cringing women who dared present themselves, Seda shouted, ‘Get me Gjegevey, now!’ and they rushed out, grateful for an errand that took them away from their mistress almost immediately.
Seda stood naked in the centre of her bedchamber, quivering slightly from the dregs of the terror and revulsion the dream had left her with.
Something scraped — the husk of a metal sound seeming to come from a greater distance than her bedchamber would allow. When she looked round, an armoured figure stood statue-still in one corner, and she could not have said whether he was there before or not. Certainly, the servants had not noted him, but then Tisamon was very good at passing unseen, and his armour was no hindrance. The armour was him, as much the focus of his physical presence as anything else.
‘So, you’re back,’ she said, her tone carefully casual. ‘I trust General Roder appreciated your assistance.’
I want to kill him, came the stony rattle of his voice, more felt than heard.
‘Of course you do. Sometimes I envy how simple your desires are, how easily satisfied. She stepped towards him like a dancer, feeling the chill of his dead eyes on her bare skin. ‘You would kill us all — all of my kinden — I know.’ For in life he had hated Wasps, which made her taming of him all the sweeter.
Not you. Never you. She stood well within his reach now, and his bladed gauntlet was donned. A single swift strike, far faster than she could react to, and she would follow her brother and Uctebri into the final dark. She reached out and touched the elegant lines of his mail, following the contours of his carapace. Oh, he was bound to her, and eagerly he followed her commands, but it was not a soldier’s loyalty that moved him, nor a slavish obedience, but something stronger and weaker than either. The closest word language had for it was love, but what could such a dreadful thing as this revenant make of that idea? She had bound him by holding his blade that was a part of him through the mysteries of the Weaponsmasters. She had bound him by feeding him blood, and she continued to do so, to keep him strong and close. All that was just the foundation, though, preliminaries that had allowed her to open negotiations with his will. She had bound him after that with promises to the heart of his Inapt nature — Inapt by kinden, and Inapt by his very existence now — that she and only she might bring back the old days when magic, and his people, were strong.
Greatest of all, though, she had bound him by understanding the razor edges of his true nature, seeing where they would bend and twist until he was a weapon that would fit her hand only. Passion and death made up the essence of Tisamon. He had been a hero fit for all the old Mantis romances, tragic and doomed and bloody-handed. So it was that what he felt for her was something like love and, if she handled him poorly, if she took a false step in toying with his bitter feelings, he might kill her despite — because of — all the chains of magic that linked them.
And if I take him to my bed? The thought was irresistible. It was possible, she suspected, but the old stories were full of those who had been lured to lie with a ghost, and had found only death. The fools in the tales were all in love themselves, though, and Seda had no such vulnerability. The thought only excited her, and it would bind the revenant to her all the more thoroughly, for good or for ill.
She nearly gave in to the temptation there and then, because there was a challenge that she could meet with her eyes open — not like the sly, sneaking threat that the Beetle girl posed. But, no, she had summoned Gjegevey, after all, and if the old man walked in on that it might kill him. She smirked at the thought, for a moment just a Wasp girl of good family treasuring a risque thought. Then her main purpose returned to her, the lurking presence of the other, and her need to secure some source of strength that Cheerwell Maker could not touch. Gjegevey was being coy with her, she knew, holding back information because he thought he knew what was best for her. She would have to disabuse him of that notion.
If only she could simply send Tisamon after the wretched Beetle girl, but she knew that would only lose her his services, for the Maker girl had already driven off the revenant before. Unless Seda was close to prevent it, she would do so again, or banish him, or even wrest control of him from Seda’s hands. Such tools as the Mantis ghost were best used against more mundane enemies. Any work of magic was vulnerable to a magician, just as (she supposed) any mechanical weapon would fall prey to the enemy’s artificers, could they but get hold of it.
There was an almost inaudible scratch at the door, Gjegevey announcing his presence. She shrugged into a robe to spare his stammers, and called for him to enter.
He shuffled in, hunched and grey-skinned, old but sufficiently distant from Wasp-kinden humanity that it was impossible to date him. He wore a robe of Imperial hues today, halved black and gold like an Auxillian’s uniform.
‘It’s time,’ she told him, as soon as he had closed the door behind him.
‘Ah, Majesty?’ Always the vague old man, but she had known him too long to be fooled. He was as keen as a knife behind the wrinkles and the rheumy eyes.
‘The Seal of the Worm, you called it,’ she told him, ‘and to me that said power. Something the Moths kept to themselves, all those years ago, almost completely excised from those writings that they let out into the wider world. They didn’t think that my people would conquer their roost at Tharn, though, and seize some few of their precious scrolls. The Seal of the Worm, Gjegevey.’ Her hand traced the spiral that she remembered, crooking into a claw for the tridentine blot that had formed the centrepiece.
The old man was silent for a moment, still only a step inside the door. ‘Majesty,’ he said at last, his voice soft and steady, ‘you know I am your loyal servant, and have been for perhaps longer than any other. Trust my wisdom on this: you do not want to meddle with it. There is no victory to be had over the Worm. There will be other secrets, but not this one. Trust me, your Majesty.’
Seda nodded as though considering this, and then: ‘Kill him,’ she said and, without pausing for breath, ‘Stop!’
In that eyeblink Tisamon had travelled almost all the way across the room towards Gjegevey, claw upraised. Her last word brought the Mantis to a halt perhaps a foot beyond striking distance. Seda watched Gjegevey’s face, the eyes gone wide, the jaw slack, staring at the tip of Tisamon’s metal claw glinting in the morning light. Not so old, then, that death does not hold a little terror for him. Well, it was a lesson he had to learn.
‘I value you, old man,’ Seda said lightly. ‘You were my friend when I had no friends. You say rightly that you were my first supporter. I treasure your advice and your company, but you must never forget,’ and now the steel entered her tone, ‘you are my servant, my slave if I decided to enforce that status upon you, and I am the Empress of all the Wasps. I will brook no divided loyalties, even if that other mistress you serve is only your idea of what is best for me. Counsel me, advise me, but do not take me for a child. Do not seek to protect me from the world, and most certainly do not seek to protect it from me. Do you understand?’