With a little time in hand, she cast her mind out, reaching for anything she could use, and found a familiar mind reaching back to her.
She recoiled in shock, but a moment later she was groping forward again, worried that she might have lost him entirely. He was still there, though, and she envisioned him behind closed eyelids: a gaunt man with a high forehead, hair grey like iron, skin like bronze, a figure owning to no particular kinden the modern world would recognize. . save that she did.
You are Cheerwell Maker, the girl the Empress hates, he identified her.
Although the Empress and I appear to have made common cause, if you can believe that, she replied.
He digested that. I would ask you: do not tell her of me. I tried to kill her — tried and failed, but I tried. Because of you.
She did not need to question him. He had been in her mind, as one of her pieces. She understood. So, who are you? And how are you here, even?
There was a pause before he answered, and she guessed he was weighing up the merits of being honest. My name is Esmail. I was a spy placed near the Empress, but I lost my way. As for here, I was drawn here with the rest of you, when Argastos came. But I was already trying to hide from the Empress. I am good at hiding. It is in my blood and my training. Besides Argastos was not interested in me. He wanted you.
You’re hurt, she understood.
By the Empress. I’ll live.
She had a sense of him moving with a freedom denied her. Where are you now, if the question means anything here?
I am. . behind the scenes, perhaps. A dark place, but untended, untenanted save for myself. I can feel. . my magical skill is just enough to know that there are other places just next to me, and yet unreachable. But I’m working on them. You must be imprisoned in one of them, the Empress in another.
There were others as well, she told him. My friends and the Empress’s bodyguard.
I found them. A pause. Or where Argastos put them, he added. I saw him take them. . They are like statues, now, where they are: statues of wood, grown into the floor. I think he is only keeping them at all because they may be useful to work on you. I had thought your halfbreed would resist him, in the end but, though she is clever, she is weak. He overpowered her.
She shifted her prison again, whilst maintaining her link to Esmail. The sound of approaching feet diminished, but did not fade away entirely. Can you help me?
I don’t know. I am trying to locate you but. . the internal architecture of where I am seems. . broken down, falling apart. There is no logic here.
The mind of Argastos, she considered, and then the tenuous connection with him was severed, gone in an instant, at his will, and a moment later a very different voice sounded loud in her head.
Beetle girl!
Seda? Che flinched, because if Argastos was carrying out his threat, this might be an agonized cry for help, a window onto the other woman’s pain.
Instead, the Empress’s tone sounded properly imperious. Listen to me, while you can. No doubt the creature has made the same threats against you as he has to me. Focus on me and I will tell you how to defend yourself. Che had the mental image of. . fighting, blade on blade.
Argastos has his legions of slaves, Seda said contemptuously. But he was a fool, and he has taken on more than he knew or understood. Seek them out: there will be those you can suborn to your purpose.
Che blinked, trying to discover what the woman meant. The exasperation of the Empress at such slow uptake came through to her clearly.
Just look! And for a few seconds she had the Empress’s eyes, and she was watching a vicious melee where the grey-faced, dead-eyed Mantis-kinden that Argastos had sent were kept away from Seda’s person by a handful of Imperial soldiers. Che recognized some of them as those who had come with Seda herself to this place, and died at the hands of Che’s own people. But there were others, too, in a motley selection of black and gold uniforms, Wasp soldiers who must have marched with General Malkan and the Seventh in the last war, and gone too far into the wood.
They are mine, Seda declared proudly. In life, in death, they are mine. You must find your own protectors from amongst Argastos’s collection.
But why?
I will need you to destroy Argastos, Beetle girl. Our truce holds until then. Quickly!
Che felt an innate revulsion at the idea: disturbing the dead who were already held in unnatural imprisonment here. And who amongst them could she move? She was no magician-empress to command loyalty beyond the grave.
And yet the sound of feet was coming nearer, and the darkness admitted movement closing in on her cell. The long march of Argastos’s servants was nearing its end.
Do they still feel lust? she wondered emptily. Or is it just cold loyalty to him that drives them?
A tremor within her, and for a moment she was almost crying out for someone to help her. . anyone. And perhaps that was just what Argastos had hoped for. Then she gathered her resolve and plunged her mind into the charnel house that was Argastos’s realm, like thrusting a hand into a rotting carcass. With a convulsive effort that seemed to turn her entire mind on its side, she drew forth a protector.
Seeing him, all she could say was, ‘I’m sorry. This is my fault. I’m sorry I brought you to this.’
The expression on his charcoal-grey face was one of mild reproach, but only because of the apology, not for her part in dooming him to this. He squared his shoulders, and she saw him not in his Company uniform, but in the armour he had worn in Khanaphes, that impenetrable suit of fluted plates that Totho had made for him. In one hand was his shield, in the other his leaf-bladed Khanaphir sword. This was Amnon prepared to do battle.
But he was not alone. To her surprise she saw that she had hauled up others, too — those whose faces she did not even know. There were a couple of aviators, and a woman in a College robe, and there were a dozen at least sporting the same sort of garb Helma Bartrer had worn when serving at dinner: clothes fit for a slave before the Revolution. Many were Beetle-kinden, but some were Ants from various cities, and they had knives and clubs and staves, all the makeshift weapons of the downtrodden.
None of them looked at her, but when the Mantids, the oppressors, emerged amongst them, Che’s guardians fell on them with a determination and a fury that startled her. Amnon was at their centre, immovable and unyielding, and the ghosts of the Apt — and what an irony! — flowed about him but held their line, and kept her safe.
And the voice of the Empress spoke to her once again. Good, but we won’t have much time now before Argastos realizes something’s gone wrong with his tawdry little plan. We need a weapon to use against him. All this around us is born of his own mind. We need something outside of him to distract him. Just a moment should be sufficient for us to break away from here, and then we will see if the two of us together can crack him.
He has had centuries to perfect his skills, Che cautioned.
What do you suggest we do, then? Seda demanded. Give in to him and become his creatures, even as these slaves are? No, we fight. Even if we must lose, we fight.