Even when he read his orders, he had guessed that Tharn was riven with factions — and how true that had turned out to be — what with two Tharen emissaries actually accompanying the Wasp woman, and even those two splitting from each other, so that only one remained and the other had been sacrificed to aid their progress. He had no idea if the splinter faction that had given him his original orders still existed.
Since he had followed the Empress into the forest, he had thought a lot on his family: his Dragonfly wife, his pureblood children. He had thought about them deliberately, so that events could not push them from his mind. He was now in the rush of the game, after so long — and how the game had broadened. They had sent him to kill an Empress, and instead he had bent the knee. He had helped her against her enemies. He had been given the chance, more than once, to drive an Art-deadly hand straight into her heart, and he had failed.
She had not given him her speech about the renewed glories of the old days, nor had she needed to. Back in Capitas he had discerned it in her: the Inapt and sorcerous Empress of a great Apt nation. He had hidden long amongst the Moths, and his main impression was that they lived only in the past tense and that, protest as they may, some part of them had already given up the fight. They lived in their own shadows, fought their empty factional games, and did their best to pretend that the world beyond their grey halls did not exist. If anything of the gloried past was to return — or even survive — they would not be responsible. Empress Seda the First, however. .
That was the promise she had made by her mere presence, and he had drunk blood for her, and sworn allegiance to her, not from any compulsions she had laid on him — his kinden and his profession alike were skilled in slipping such chains — but because he had believed.
But he had forgotten that the past was not just the glories of Inapt rule — the age of magicians, wisdom and great deeds — and now, after hearing those words, he could not banish them from his mind.
The Seal of the Worm.
He could claim no great knowledge of his people’s lore, for the Assassin-kinden were scattered, their ways lost. He had lived and studied amongst Moths, though. That the Empress should seek the power hoarded by Argastos was no surprise. Esmail was no seer but his senses were ever honed for the moment, and he could feel that dark, bloated knot of power ahead. If it was corrupt and decayed, well, find any great node of the old power that was not. The Moths had always loved darkness, and used fear as their weapon, and time would have rotted that into something worse. It was power, though, and he could not fault Seda for seeking it.
He could feel the Seal, however, and that was a different matter. The Seal, whose stony grey absence was pinned down by Argastos’s decomposing weight, and, beyond it. .
In truth, Esmail could not say what lay beyond it, but he knew the tales. That great war which had encompassed all the known world, just as the Empire’s current conflict seemed to. . That great foe which had united the powers of the day against it, so that deadly enemies could clasp hands and put aside their enmities in order to defeat this common adversary: the Worm. Call them that, and not by their true name, for names are power.
They had sought to make all other races the same as them, said the stories. Meaning conquest? Meaning the extermination of all other kinden until only they themselves remained? Not even that, the stories insisted: they sought to make all the same as them, and it was such a perversion of the fundamentals of nature that in the end all were united against them, and there followed a war the like of which the world would never see again.
And when they were defeated but not destroyed, when they were cast down into their subterranean lairs, the cost was so great that the Moths — the leaders of this great host, for even then the Khanaphir Masters were already in decline — knew that no repeat of this war could be allowed. The Worm must not be permitted to regain its strength and bring such horrors again. But the Moths and their allies could not purge that underground realm of them, though armies of thousands were sent down, never to return. So there had been a ritual, the Moths’ ultimate sanction, one of a power and a cost unprecedented. In its wake the ancient world was forever changed, some powers exhausted and near destroyed by the cost of the war. And it was a shameful victory, too — as Esmail had read in secret tomes the Moths had never intended him to find. The Moths had banished the Worm, and sealed the path of its return, but not only the Worm, Esmail discovered. The Moths had failed, in the end, and that ritual had been nobody’s first choice.
Save one, perhaps.
Esmail had fallen a long way short of his purpose, and even that purpose had been someone else’s. He himself possessed nothing but that fragile family — no kinden, no agenda. He had almost forgotten that he was not truly one of the Empress’s Red Watch. That was an inherent peril of taking another’s face and voice: it was easy to become too engrossed in the role.
And the Empress was here for Argastos, and not the Worm.
Not the Worm yet.
For he felt he knew the Empress now, and even if she consumed Argastos entirely she would still be hungry. It was in her nature — perhaps in the nature of all absolute tyrants — to want more.
Do I turn on her? But, despite his years, she frightened Esmail, with her power and her ruthlessness, and there was still that dream, that impossible promise of a return of the old ways. If those days could return, then perhaps even the Assassin-kinden might walk the world again as they once had.
It was when his thoughts were so thoroughly caught in such a vice, unable to claw their way to any action, that he considered the other. The Empress, she who could consider breaking the Seal of the Worm with equanimity, was still frightened by one thing.
Esmail had felt her presence, and hidden from it, just as he hid from Seda and from the trailing tendrils of Argastos himself. Like Seda, the other had a strength that lacked subtlety, allowing Esmail to spy on her, sensing a power that was sister to the Empress’s own, but with a very different mind behind it.
However, she was distant now, almost untraceable, and perhaps that was the end of it. Perhaps nothing could stand between the Seal and the Empress, if she chose to undo the work of all those past ages. But Esmail found that he had not entirely given up hope. Beetles had surprised a lot of people, over the years. Just ask the Moths.
How the Nethyen might have taken it, had Maure’s song not changed their mood, Tynisa could not say. But, of course, the halfbreed claimed to have seen this moment coming, and perhaps the woman had genuinely been working towards preparing Che’s entrance.
The Beetle girl stood at the clearing’s edge, her dark skin rubied under the leaping firelight, and she had seized the attention of every Mantis-kinden there. A Nethyen man stood beside her, unkempt and long-haired, and looking over her other shoulder was surely the very mantis that had abducted her in the first place, the largest of its kind Tynisa had ever seen.
The Mantids were gathering close together, many with weapons in hand, and she could see Thalric trying to move towards Che and being excluded again and again, walled away from her by the bodies of the Nethyen. Amnon stood back and watched, snapbow in hand.
‘Wait,’ Tynisa instructed them both. Thalric threw her a desperate glance, but something in her expression must have got through to him. Whether it was because of Maure’s song or Che’s newfound presence, for once the Mantids had something on their minds other than blood.