Tonight, though, he would spend in the Empire’s camp, because the Wasp soldiers had fought hard to capture this city, and this was their night. Woe betide the taverner who tried to charge them for their wine. Woe to any woman who wanted to say no. Woe to Collegium, really, but hadn’t Helmess been warning them not to fight, all this time?
‘Just think if I had won at Lots and been made Speaker, how much of this could have been avoided?’ he asked Jodry aloud. ‘Just think how many of our people you got killed — you and Maker between you — just to bring us to this point after all.’
Beside him, with a tortured creaking, the massive corpse of Jodry Drillen revolved and swayed on the gibbet.
Thirty-Two
Tegrec had been running for longer than was good for him. He had never been a man who had taken to exercise, the prestige of his family propelling him just far enough up the ranks that he could delegate the running around to others. Now he ran as he had never run before, and at the same time he was drawing on all the magic he had ever learned, with just one end in mind:
Find a way out of this place.
The domain of Argastos pressed all around him, that grey, gnarled shadow of the forest without, but its master’s attention was most decidedly elsewhere. Tegrec, a minor distraction at the most, had some small space of time to get clear before the place noticed him again and made him pay.
He could sense all around him the spirits of the imprisoned dead. Argastos’ home was like a pitcher plant, and all those who ever entered had neither left nor truly died. The agonized remnants of them were impaled on the trees surrounding him, writhing and screaming. If he came to their attention, he would join them in short order.
And not just death but a living death, as a slave of Argastos. He saw it all so clearly now.
He had not wanted things to turn out like this, but that was hardly worth saying. Born a Wasp without Aptitude, he had lived his whole life as an impostor amongst his own people. He had learned magic in scraps and tatters, leaching what little could be had from the spoils of the Twelve-year War and carefully playing his political games until a golden opportunity had come his way: when the Empire took Tharn, home of the Moth-kinden. He had been sent there as governor, and he had sold out his own people in return for knowledge and power, and he had given himself over to the Moths.
And they had given him back, in a way, so that he had ended up at the Imperial court as Tharen ambassador, brokering an alliance between his surrogate and his birth kinden that the Moths would never have considered had the Empress not been who — or what — she was.
So far, so good, but then everything had fallen apart. He had never wanted to come to this terrible place, in the Empress’s entourage; to see the murder of his fellow Moth ambassador; to see that other impostor, the assassin, suddenly spring out from behind the guise of dull Major Ostrec. .
He was not a man temperamentally suited to such events, and so he ran, hoping that he could outdistance the reach of both Argastos and Seda before he was noticed again.
All around him he could feel this horribly dead place waking up. Its attention had contracted towards its centre, dragging in its chosen victims — the Empress and her opposite — but now the tendrils of its thought were flexing and twitching, its trap was setting itself again, and he was still within its range; he could not find the way out.
Fear endowed him with a sudden surge of strength, increasing his stumbling pace as he battered at the fabric of Argastos’s realm like a man clawing through cobwebs.
And it gave way, and the forest he found himself staggering through was no less dark and grim of aspect, but at least it was real and physical.
He paused, and leant against a tree, fighting to get his breath back. Clear, I’m clear! Even the murky forest air seemed sweet to him.
Something moved close by, and he felt a chill pass through him. Did something else come with me?
He looked about and realized that he was surrounded. There was a score of Mantis-kinden shifting in and out of sight amid the trees, with bows and spears. Nethyen or Etheryen? He could not tell.
‘Servants of the Green,’ he croaked, using the ancient Moth greeting to their followers.
For a long moment those words hung in the air, testing their power against the Mantids, while the world itself seemed to hold its breath.
Then one of them shook her head. ‘No masters,’ she said. ‘Not any more. Seize the trespasser.’
‘No!’ Tegrec gasped. Not after all I’ve been through. And he began backing away, seeing some of them drawing back their bowstrings, others spreading out. They were not moving towards him, though, even as he took step after step away. Their attention, hungry for blood, was focused elsewhere.
And at last he turned to see another Mantis behind him, a weathered-looking man with his long hair unbound.
‘What do you want?’ Tegrec gasped.
‘No masters,’ the man echoed. ‘Amalthae?’ Something in the way he stood led Tegrec’s gaze sideways and upwards, until at last he saw the colossal beast towering by the Mantis’s side.
Tegrec lashed out with all the force of his magic, but the mind he encountered was more than his equal. Then those dread killing arms were reaching for him.
Che awoke into darkness, but this was no new thing for her. She found herself standing, with walls pressing close on three sides.
Argastos’s domain.
And she was a daughter of Collegium, whether Apt or Inapt, and she had been raised to question. First she called on her Art, and found that the gloom about her was not dispelled, but hung before her eyes all the more. So, nothing as mundane as mere darkness, then. This is what Argastos wants me to see.
Not utterly dark, either — because Argastos wanted her to see just enough and no further. Enough to see that the indistinct walls around her comprised a dead end in what must be a maze. She remembered reading about Moths and mazes in a book, while she had been looting the College library for anything that might help her with her newly imposed Inaptitude. It had been a favourite pastime of Moth Skryres to trap their enemies in mazes of the mind. Che herself had nearly become lost in one through Seda’s doing, snared in her own memories. Until Maure walked into my mind to rescue me.
And did that mean Maure was just as capable of rescuing herself, or was she also a prisoner elsewhere in this labyrinth, or in some other cell altogether?
What does Argastos want? Is this a test? She stepped forwards and began to try a handful of turns, leftwards always. Her hand found the wall’s surface weirdly discontinuous, metallic and lanced with spines, nothing that matched what the eye could make out.
She had every expectation of the maze’s configuration shifting around her, because why should Argastos play fair? If there was a test here, it was not of her ability to solve a physical maze, after all.
She closed her eyes, seeking strength within her, before applying it carefully to the walls all around her, and making them creak. It seemed possible that sheer force might suffice, to break this place asunder, but what if that was something Argastos had foreseen? Would it leave her in an even worse position?
Instead, she let her mind flow out from her, twisting and turning over the contours of the maze, appreciating its nuances all at once and giving it no chance to change behind her back. She had not realized that she was capable of such concentration, and perhaps it was only here, in this pit of old magic, that she could have done it, but soon she had the entire maze in mind, and still her senses drifted outwards, calm and curious, until she found Maure.
Che?