‘The Wasps?’ Eujen demanded.
‘The Wasps are fighting their Spiders,’ Laszlo explained, as though it was obvious. ‘They’ve actually done it: they’ve gone after each other. There’s hundreds and hundreds scrapping all over — and you know the Spiders aren’t just sitting still and taking it. They’ve got archers at every window, and the Wasps are bringing their engines in, and. . it’s a mess, a real mess.’
Eujen and Stenwold’s glances met sharply.
‘Stab me, that changes everything,’ the Antspider murmured.
‘Push them,’ Eujen decided. ‘All along their line. They have no reinforcements now. Keep their machines busy and push them back, and. . the city must learn of it. Print me more leaflets, and call up every Fly-kinden who can get out there — just to spread the word. This is our chance. This is our chance!’
Thirty-Six
‘So, what now?’ Che demanded. ‘Come on, Argastos. What’s your next sally?’
Another dark place, and she received a sudden insight that there might be nothing else left in the man’s withered mind. He had lain bound in the earth for so long that he could not remember the sun. Here was some gloomy cavern, with her placed on a ledge beside a drop that fell in folds of rock for three hundred feet. Down there, she could see faint signs of fire, in pinpoints like stars.
‘This is the place of my enemy,’ came his voice, and he faded into existence almost within arm’s reach, and with none of the excessive drama he had used at the table. What illuminated him, she could not say, but he cut a stark figure of grey and black and white, the scales of his mail glinting like moonlight, his skin like stone, his cloak merging seamlessly into the darkness.
‘Some might say you’re too obsessed with them,’ Che pointed out, ‘given they’re a thousand years gone.’
‘But they’re not gone. They endure, on the far side of the Seal. And I was sacrificed to a living death to keep them there — not because it was needful, for in a thousand years the Worm have never tried to break through, nor could they ever. I was buried and forgotten because they thought they could bury their own guilt along with me.’ He eyed her bitterly. ‘Do you not agree, just for one moment, that I have been treated poorly? Am I not deserving of some sympathy, Beetle girl?’
Che folded her arms, trying to stretch out her power as subtly as she could in order to find the edges of this charade he had woven about her, and so tear it down, but he was always ahead of her, dancing where she must lumber, forever extending the world beyond her reach. ‘And for this I become your whore, do I? And relinquish all I have to you?’
‘You will be my concubine, valued and treasured,’ he told her. ‘And as for “all you have”, if you will only use your power as I direct, what might you then learn about how to control it? See: you are the stronger, I freely admit, and yet you are like your kinden’s namesake, a beetle blundering blindly about while I lead you one way and another. You have so much to learn, and do you think that there is anyone left in the world to teach you, save me? And you know I am no mean power myself, for why else did you and the Wasp girl come here, save to steal what is mine? With our strengths combined, what might we not accomplish?’
‘Nothing good,’ she decided, and, when he just stared at her, she went on, ‘Argastos, yes, you are hard done by. What a terrible thing they did to you, all those years ago. And had you not spent all the years in-between in dooming everyone who came here to that exact same fate, then you might be able to presume on my sympathies. But I have seen your collection of victims, and I am not at all sure that your solution for dealing with the Worm does not deserve some guilt and expiation. And I still do not believe that anything you intend is for the good. For anyone’s good — least of all mine.’
She felt strong, while saying that, and for a moment the shadowy world around her seemed to waver.
Then he was on his feet, glowering at her. ‘You self-righteous child! How can you know how it was? How can you know what I thought, or what might have been! I was there! Someone had to make the choice, and I was the only one strong enough to do it! And you stand here, with your unearned inheritance, your life of freedom that I bought for you with my everlasting torment, and you dare to judge? You should come to me on your knees in gratitude for what I have done for the world!’
Che sighed. ‘So, you have tried to draw on my better nature, and now you try to threaten me. What next, Argastos? For if you could simply take what you wanted from me, then you would have done so without hesitation. I am just a slave girl who has stolen something that’s of value, to you. If you must woo me, it is for that reason only.’
For a long moment their gazes locked, and she felt relieved at the honesty visible there, the open acknowledgement that everything she had said was true. And then he nodded, and the hard-edged expression that came across his face almost made her want to withdraw her words.
‘Perhaps you think I will beg?’ he suggested. ‘No, I will wait for you to beg me. You are right. I have not been content to suffer alone. I have always had followers, and all those who have come to this place are my rightful prey. I have gathered them all to me. Now I give you to them. They remember what it is like, to live. Their appetites have been starved these long years, but they will awake again if I give the order. You may possess your strength, Beetle girl, but I will wager that here I can hold you down while they slake their lusts on you. And I have many hungry servants these days — many! You are proud, Beetle girl, just like the little Wasp is proud, and I will break you both as proud slaves should be broken. I shall return in a day or so, as the time shall seem to you. For now, I go to rouse my servants to the heights of their vigour. Enjoy the wait, Beetle girl, for it shall be the last peace you will know for some time.’
He boiled away into nothing, leaving her staring at the dark that he had gone back to. She could feel fear hovering at the edge of her attention, in case she had need of it, but her mind was working as analytically as if she was faced with a logic problem back at College. That Argastos intended to carry out his threat, she had no doubt. She was no helpless girl, though, and his mastery of her was reliant on her being unable to use her strength properly.
Her surroundings had now changed from the caverns of his memory to something better fitting the fate he intended for her: a small cell, but with its walls formed of knotted roots as if she was buried beneath some colossal tree. Perhaps this, too, was some place Argastos recalled from his long-ago life.
She tried to change the walls, but they would not bend for her. In her mind they were unaccountably slippery, impossible to bring her strength to bear on. Well, then, that was only her most obvious and crude application of power. He would have anticipated that. She must keep one step ahead of his imagination.
She heard movement from without, and for a moment her mind threw up an image: a column of dead Mantis men approaching, their hollow eyes hungry for even the cruellest memento of life. Fear clawed at her, but she stepped back from it, holding tenuously on to her calm. And she moved her cell.
This was no physical place, of course, even though it imprisoned her. It was set within a matrix of Argastos’s thoughts. There were no hard laws that determined the relationship of one mind-place to another. If she could not escape her cell, she could relocate it, sliding the idea of it through Argastos’s mouldering mind, and thus giving herself more time.
It was a temporary solution, but one that she could perhaps repeat a few times before he realized what she was doing. He had not prepared for it. She had the idea that, just as his backdrops were always gloomy and enclosed, so his ability to think like a human being had been decaying for a long time. He would find it hard to predict her.