They had been gilded once, he understood. For this is Argax, seat of Argastos, greatest war leader of the ancient world. The knowledge came unbidden and unwanted. Not a barrow, but a hall once. Nobody builds doors into a barrow.
Gjegevey broke from him and actually outstripped him, hobbling frantically with his staff, ‘Majesty!’ he called out, and Esmail knew this was his moment — if moments existed for misbegotten creatures such as himself.
Seda turned, and on her face there was a strange mixture of elation and desperation. She had found Argastos’s lair and yet, at the same time, she had only moments left to discover how to draw power from it, and even Esmail himself could sense no obvious breach in the place’s armour. The undoubted magic was not simply for the taking.
Because it’s in someone’s hands already? But he was speeding up now, hard on Gjegevey’s heels, and cast that thought aside.
‘Help me, Gjegevey,’ the Empress commanded. ‘Quickly — they’re coming.’
And Esmail found it in his heart to pity her then, just a young Wasp girl risen higher than ever a woman of her kinden had before, but frightened, at the end of her resources. Who would not have done the same as she had, in her position.
Perhaps it was that pity that gave him away, for Ostrec had never allowed any for anyone save himself.
He was almost in reach of her when he saw her eyes widen. . and abruptly Ostrec was in tatters, the falseness of his guise showing through at every edge. Seda cried out in shock and Esmail lunged forwards — one Art-edged hand extended to cut her heart out.
It was the old man that got in the way. He had that much idiocy left in him, or perhaps it was courage. Whatever the Empress had been to him, he threw his tired bones before the Assassin’s stroke, so that Esmail’s hand cut his staff in two, and then sawed into his ribs, shearing them apart, opening his chest in a sudden rush of ruptured blood. Gjegevey collapsed like a bundle of sticks, and Seda screamed in rage and grief. Esmail, trying to close those last paces of distance, was braced for the magical lash of her temper, but the flash of light he saw was something far more prosaic than that. Her sting struck him about the shoulder and side, with a searing blow that staggered and stopped him, slapping him to the ground, and he knew he had failed.
Not dead, though — not dead yet. And he was lurching up on one elbow, knowing another sting must come, and desperate to live despite it all, even as Ostrec was sloughing off him like moulting chitin. And then he opened his eyes to see her standing there, a hand thrust out to kill him, but her temper restrained by reins of iron. Her eyes were the coldest things Esmail had ever seen.
‘Show me your true face, spy,’ she spat. ‘Before you die, let me see my enemy, I command it.’
And he felt her magic take hold of him with clumsy fingers, prising and straining, so that he screamed with the pain of violation that was worse even than the burning of her sting. But in the midst of it, a little jewel of calm remained, because resisting pain, staving off torture, was part of his training, and Seda was not skilled enough to break his mask with mere force alone.
But if he did not give her something, she would simply kill him, destroy his mind by trying to unlock it. He must choose a face for her.
He almost showed her the grey skin and white eyes of a Moth. It would have been appropriate, for it would have placed blame where it was due. He had no love for the people who had been his jailers for all those years, in all but name.
But his family, his wife, his children, they were still under the shadow of the Moths. Whatever else he might wish, whatever vengeance might be his due, he could not endanger them further.
When he gave her a face, just another face that was not his own, he saw Seda recoil, but she accepted it. It was one of the few options he had that would be believed implicitly, and he put all his skill into it, presenting such a perfect and polished likeness that it would have been accepted over the real thing. He gave her the lean and elegant features of a Spider-kinden.
Tegrec was kneeling by Gjegevey’s side, but his expression showed Seda plainly that the ancient man was past any help that magic or surgery might offer. When the turncoat Wasp stood up, he was backing away, retreating from her, fear and misery running rampant across his face.
Seda stared at the assassin now revealed to her: ‘Ostrec’ had been a Spider all this time, and it made sense. It made far too much sense. Oh, she had read about the old Inapt spies and their face-changing magic, although she had never thought to encounter one. Whilst they were not an exclusively Spider elite, it was from that kinden that most of them derived. And here she was, with her armies marching alongside the Spiders, and surely she had known there would be a betrayal, a reckoning at some time. And, of course, General Roder had warned her: never trust a Spider. Everyone knew they were treacherous.
And so, after Roder’s advice, she had made provision for that. She had given special orders to Captain Vrakir, sending the man off to keep an eye on General Tynan and the Second, had she not? And, with that, a thought went out to the Red Watch, who were bound to her in blood. Vrakir would know what to do.
But as for this traitor before her, who had killed her beloved slave and who had come so close to killing her-
And Tisamon came bursting backwards into the clearing, and she realized that she had allowed herself to be distracted, perhaps fatally, for here were her other enemies.
It was a Spider girl that the revenant Mantis was duelling with, and Seda saw, with a lurch of her heart, that she was somehow managing to hold Tisamon off, landing no blows but keeping him at bay with the blurring passes of her rapier, and there, breaking away from the fight in a brief flurry of wings, to drop down ten feet behind Tisamon, was-
She froze. She had not known.
‘Thalric?’
Of course she knew that he had not died in Khanaphes, as General Brugan had tried to claim, but she had not tried to find him. She had thought that he would come back to her of his own accord. He had been her consort, after all, when she had needed one. He had shared her bed. .
And he had a hand out towards her, palm open, and she looked him in the eye and waited, but his sting never came. He was just staring at her, and she wondered how he might remember those nights spent together. She saw his jaw clench.
Somewhere beyond their collective notice, Tegrec found the very limit of his courage, and a moment later he was running for the trees, and nobody even spared him a glance.
Then she was there, the loathsome Beetle girl, dark and squat and ugly, blundering out from the trees with some ragged half-breed as her handmaiden. And, at Seda’s merest thought, Tisamon had broken from his opponent and gone for her, in a frantic attempt to rid the Empress of her most pressing problem.
Thalric kicked back into the air immediately, and his sting-shot punched the armoured revenant in the side, sending Tisamon off balance for two seconds. Long enough for the Spider woman to catch him and force him to face her. Long enough for Thalric to drop between him and his prize, defending the Beetle girl with his own life.
‘Thalric!’ Seda shouted in rage and despair, seeking out the magic with which the Beetle had bound him to herself, but unable to grasp it. How has she done this?
In a lightning rush, Tisamon disengaged and fell back towards her, putting himself between her and her enemies. Seda’s eyes found the Beetle girl’s — Cheerwell Maker’s — and the hate crackled and spat between them. And yet only one way: her own spite breaking against the girl’s placid resistance. Beetles endured, was that not what they said? Oh, she could sense that the girl had grown as a magician, just as much as she herself had, but in different directions: less suited to attack, more to defence.