He nodded, swallowing. ‘I congratulate your Majesty on your, ah, reflexes,’ he murmured, just a dry whisper, no doubt calculating what a small fraction of a second’s delay in her countermanding order would have accomplished. Tisamon had not moved throughout the exchange.
‘There was a war,’ she prompted him. ‘I have gleaned that much. But there were many wars, and they blur into one another. Mosquitos, Assassin Bugs, Spiders — the Moths were always fighting someone. And they never simply write as historians. Everything is metaphor. Except that I can see the gap, the hole they have made, as they censored their own past. The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’
‘Yes,’ Gjegevey agreed heavily. ‘The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’ He gave the words such strange weight that Seda paused for a moment, abandoning her rhetoric.
‘When we were in Khanaphes together, I saw the embassies there. The ancient Masters had entertained ambassadors from all the great powers of their day, and their Beetle servants had maintained that lost past even to the present day.’
Gjegevey nodded glumly, and his eyes flicked to the uplifted blade again. ‘Majesty, may I, ah…’
‘Stand down, Tisamon.’
There was a notable moment of reluctance before the armoured figure lowered its arm and stood back, freezing once again into that brooding Mantis stillness. She would have to have a slave or a prisoner brought up, she knew, for he hated being denied his ration of blood.
‘I saw statues of Moths there,’ Seda continued. ‘Spiders, Dragonflies, Mantis-kinden even. And your people, Gjegevey, ranked as equals. My own kinden were housed in a building that had two of your cousins displayed in stone at the door, and I was given to understand that this was because, when those likenesses were carved, the lands that would become my Empire were yours. Is this true?’
Again that mournful nod and, when her expression hinted at exasperation, he spoke. ‘You have guessed it all or, hm, most of it, I think. Yes, my people had their great days. Yes, there was a, mn, a war that came that we could not stay out of. Yes, after that war we were no longer great, nor have we, ah, ever been so again. The will to change the world was gone from us, hm, after that. We had used it all up in the fight against the Worm.’
‘Worm-kinden,’ she mocked.
‘Ah, no, you know better than that, from your stolen Moth scrolls, from your deciphering of their writings. But the term, the insult, was how they were known from the war, for to the Moths there was ever power in names.’
‘Gjegevey, the Moths had many enemies,’ she told him, and his long face twisted, foreseeing what was coming. ‘The Mosquitos were the greatest threat to their power that they write openly of — or at least as openly as they ever do — and I see that conflict was underway before this… before whatever it was that resulted in the Seal of the Worm. But your own people…?’
‘No,’ Gjegevey whispered, ‘we took no part.’
‘The blood-drinkers, Gjegevey, practitioners of a magic that you yourself have decried. I don’t hold the Moths out as paragons of virtue, but surely…’ She was watching him through narrowed eyes.
‘We took no part,’ he repeated.
‘So what was it that brought your… warriors? Did your people even possess such? What brought you into the war against the Worm?’
‘Yes, we had warriors,’ Gjegevey murmured, so quietly that she could barely hear. ‘Our, hm, our Sentinels had mail that was the envy of the world, and we fought. You do not believe me, with only my example before you, but we fought.’ Before she could press her questions, he looked up, eyes abruptly sharp. ‘Would you see, Majesty?’
She stared at him, and Tisamon quivered slightly, responding to her frustration.
‘The Seal of the Worm, Majesty,’ Gjegevey went on, a strange tone to his voice. ‘Or one of them. I can take you to it.’
To Seda it always seemed that for her to leave Capitas was like having to set in motion an avalanche. Her word was law, her mere whim the driving force behind all the lives around her, but even she could not make these things happen fast. The Imperial bureaucracy gathered pace around her, sending advance scouts and guards, forming her entourage, requisitioning vehicles and in all other ways ensuring that her course was as smooth as possible, if not as swift.
At the edge of her notice was the fact that many of the faces — those that shuffled the deck of her staff and set out the new patterns required to get her where she wanted to go — had changed recently. The palace seemed to have suffered some subtle catastrophe, and the men brought in to replace the fallen or lost all had a certain look, almost a taste to them.
But she told herself she would come back to that. She would first see what it was that Gjegevey wished to show her, and she would judge him on it, and if this escapade turned out to be one more attempt merely to turn her aside, then she would deal with the old man once and for all. Not without regret, it was true, but she could not allow herself to be manipulated, not any more. She had lived through enough of that before her brother died.
The salt mine at Coretsy had changed hands a few times in the Empire’s history, being sufficiently far north and east from Myna that the Beetle-kinden there had not been able to prevent the Wasps walking in and taking it over when the winds of politics and war had blown that way. Recently the Mynans had reclaimed it as part of their sovereign territory, under the acclaimed Treaty of Gold, but as the Mynans were currently not even holding on to Myna, their control over the mine had also lapsed. Still, it was a surprising and risky move for the Empress, so the number of Wasp soldiers that descended upon the tiny community outnumbered the entire local population several times over.
Alighting from her airship — a small, swift craft that had flown with a half-dozen Spearflights to escort it — Seda saw only a handful of buildings raised in a style that recalled somewhat the low, half-underground dwellings of Bee-kinden, but with rounded roofs, so that from overhead they might be mistaken for little hills. The entry to the mine itself could have swallowed any of the buildings easily, and drew the eye away from such meagre dwellings. The gaping portal was set into a hillside, a maw twelve feet high sloping down into the earth.
Coretsy was thronging with her soldiers, but there was a welcoming committee of locals there too, who stood out by virtue of most of them being twice as tall as the Wasps. Mole Crickets, she saw, and should have expected as much, for they were the best miners, and the Empire shipped them in wherever hard work needed to be done. About waist level to the pitch-skinned giants clustered a knot of others, mostly Beetle-kinden, though they looked subtly different to the sophisticated Capitas breed Seda was used to seeing.
‘So, this is who gets condemned to the salt mines, is it?’ she asked Gjegevey as she strode out from under the airship’s shadow, the old man hobbling after her, with Tisamon’s metal silence bringing up the rear.
‘Ah, no, your Majesty,’ the Woodlouse-kinden corrected her almost urgently. ‘They are, hm, not slaves, nor are they sent nor forced, ah
…’ He was losing his breath, unable to keep up with her confident stride, and she found herself suddenly face to face with the delegation of locals. There was a fraction of a pause, very obvious to her, before they knelt, not quite in unison. The Mole Crickets amongst them were still taller than her, even in obeisance.
There was a commonality about them, she noticed, the Beetles and the Crickets. It was as though they had been glazed in the same kiln. A film of white had settled on them, into the creases of their lined faces, in the folds of their clothes. Salt.
‘These mines have been worked for… a, hm, long time. More than Myna and the, hem, Empire has claimed them over the years. Mosquitos, yes. Moth-kinden, certainly,’ Gjegevey huffed, catching up. ‘These men are of mining families; their ancestors served the Moths a thousand years ago, hm, no doubt. It is a proud calling. A mystery.’