And there was more, alongside that antique host. He saw plenty in amongst them that seemed to be relics of a more recent time: the same chitin and leather as had been worn by the Nethyen still living outside, back where the world was at least nominally sane. They hung from their stands right alongside their elder cousins and, if he had been minded, he could have traced the evolution: the decline of Mantis culture from its glory days to the remnants of the present.
Black and gold caught his eye, and he realized that Argastos had welcomed more visitors than just the locals.
There was the dark chainmail of Sarnesh Ants, too, a variety of designs as though this was some armourer’s museum. He saw Collegiate robes draped slack and empty, now they were gutted of their Beetle owner, and aviator’s canvas, helm and goggles and all. And of course there were the Wasps, for the Seventh Army had been this way in recent memory. A handful of the Light Airborne, some heavier infantry plate, the light mail they had distributed to Imperial pilots during the last war, so that he thought of that downed airship they had taken refuge in.
Che gave a shuddering breath, and he spotted it just as she did. Here was a Collegiate Company soldier’s armour built for a massive frame, and around it the others: the loose, discarded gear of Seda’s Pioneers. The Empress’s eyes were fixed on a ragged old robe, scarcely worthy of a stand of its own.
‘I have had many visitors over the years,’ Argastos intoned. ‘They are no more than memories now, my trophies. But you! You are special. You have come to bring me my revenge, the two of you. Such strength you possess, and yet so little idea how to use it, and here I am, with a millennium’s experience, just waiting for that burst of power to set me free.’
He was standing now, leaning forward over the table.
‘And, believe me, when I am free the world shall know it. Between us, we three shall shake it to its foundations. We shall cast down my kin, and right all wrongs, and all things that displease us shall be banished from this world, even as the Worm was. No mercy! You, the inheritors of the old days, you shall be my brides, my lovers, and we shall use your power to remake the world in our image.’
And surely Che or Seda were bound to laugh at him then, or at least slap him down somehow, and yet the two of them seemed to be paying Argastos far too much heed. And so Thalric decided to play to his own strengths and puncture the man’s expanding self-esteem.
‘Revenge on the Moths? A bit late, no? And if anything you Inapt were capable of could achieve anything, why wouldn’t they have done it already? It’s not for want of trying that they’re next to extinct.’
He succeeded in getting Argastos’s attention then, which was the most he could claim. The Moth was suddenly staring at him as though one of the chairs had piped up of its own accord. And. .
With a single crash, in perfect unison, every suit of armour, every set of garments there had taken a step forward, raising dust from the floor which had gone undisturbed since the start of time, and they were now all occupied, every one. Thalric froze in place, his further words dying inside his mouth. A grey face in every helm, curdled eyes staring out at him. Lean, sharp Mantis faces, the brown of Beetles’ skins now charred to coal, the brother-sister likenesses of Ants and the death-pallor of his own kinden, and all staring out at him with expressions of such hopeless, terrifying misery that it shook him, it shook everything he called his own.
He met the gaze of the nearest Wasp, a man in the armour of the Airborne, and saw the man’s lips moving over and over: Help me, help me, help me. .
And Thalric felt his innards turn to water, a fear twisting inside him that was as old as his kinden, as old as the darkness itself, and he said no more.
Che could not bring herself to look at Amnon’s armour, not now that he would be occupying it once again. Trapped here like all of them, so many, I had not thought. . Was this what the ancient Skryres had intended, when they had devised this place? That it should be a pitcher plant trap for the ghosts of all who came here during the years to come?
She decided that they had. She knew that much at least about the Moth-kinden. And she could even appreciate why, for below her, directly below her, was the Great Seal, the capstone of Argastos’s grand plan, which kept the Worm trapped in whatever half-world had been curled about it. Argastos had wrought it, using all the might of the Inapt, and then his own people had doomed him to guard it forever, and she did not know whether that was justice or not. His followers had come, too, in their loyal, unthinking ranks, his Mantis war band taking their place for all eternity at their master’s side, likewise everyone else who had been drawn here, and died here. .
She looked at Maure, and found the woman staring out over that dead host, the tears running down her face, and she understood. Not just cast-off shells, not just left-over cocoons where the real occupant had fled. Like Argastos himself, these were the true minds and essences of the dead.
And his fate was not just. He was right about that. But surely he was part of this injustice, the disease and not the remedy.
But he was staring at her and at Seda, and his attention, his strength of personality, was all around her, and she found she could not venture to speak.
‘Your slave thinks I am deluded,’ he said, in almost a whisper. It was not clear to which of them he was attributing Thalric’s servitude. ‘But I am no fool, and I know the world has moved on. I have my army here, my legion of the undying, but what would that count for against the wide Apt world?’ He really did have a very compelling smile. ‘But I will not have to rely on anything so antiquated. You yourselves have shown me that.’ And he nodded companionably at Seda, who was staring at him with the same unwilling fixation as Che herself. ‘For I will have myself an Empire,’ Argastos breathed. ‘And I will have a city of the Apt to serve my will. And I do not need to understand it, so long as my slaves know their trades — and so long as I have you as my consorts.’
Che tried to open her mouth to respond, but there was an invisible hand laid on her that stopped her words, censoring her very thoughts. She reached out for her power, but Argastos stood firmly between her will and her ability. She was stronger than him, she knew, for she had been crowned in Khanaphes, and Seda too. But they were in Argastos’s realm now, and he had been working on them, unthought-of and unsuspected, ever since they had come there.
And he really did have a presence about him, a strong, smooth confidence. She found herself staring into his face, marking those elegant Moth lines. Had Achaeos ever looked like that? She did not think so. And Thalric? Thalric was some ugly Apt creature, a servant, a slave. Not like us. For of course the world was divided into Apt and Inapt for a reason, and she should simply be grateful that she had somehow crossed onto the right side.
So when he said, ‘With your aid, I shall regain my proper place in the world,’ she found herself nodding along with it, even though a panicking undercurrent in her mind was desperately trying to fight him off. He must have known that he had her in thrall, then, for his smile broadened as he declared, ‘All shall know that the War Master is returned.’
And Thalric snickered.
The world seemed to stop around them, and in this single moment Argastos’s self-control fractured. The one thing he had never been anticipating was mockery.