‘I understand now,’ said Che. The moment she opened her mouth, the only competition for their ears was the cracking of wood on the fire.
‘My sister has spoken to you,’ the Beetle girl declared, at which Tynisa twitched but, of course, Che did not mean her. She meant that other sister, Seda. ‘Will you let me speak now as well?’ It seemed unnecessary to ask, as everyone was already hanging on her every word, but Tynisa sensed some additional significance to the question — a magician asking permission? She glanced at Maure, and saw a profoundly serious expression on the necromancer’s face. Whatever Che was doing, there was more to it than Tynisa either saw or could understand.
No word was spoken, but Che plainly took that silence as assent. ‘She has promised you, I don’t know what: power, the redress of old grievances. I suppose it’s the way of things that I should make promises as well.’ There was a calm assurance to Che standing before that armed host, something that Collegiate Assemblers would envy. ‘But I have spoken to Amalthae.’ Here she made a brief gesture towards the insect towering beside her, and Tynisa saw its huge-eyed head cock minutely as it followed the movement.
‘Of course, I want you to stop fighting the Empress’s war,’ Che addressed them. ‘And I should be standing here like a daughter of Collegium, and telling you about our cause and how right we are, and all the same things she has told you, whatever they were. I should bully and taunt and bribe you into becoming my foot-soldiers instead of hers. Sorry, but can I have some water or something?’
Tynisa snorted with laughter, horribly loud in that silent clearing, but that was more like the Che she knew. That was her sister, sure enough.
There was an awkward pause, until one of the Nethyen cautiously approached her and proffered a cup. It was not water, Tynisa knew, but Che took a gulp without hesitating, and in doing so she sealed her safe conduct for that night, or at least for the length of her speech. More invisible walls and customs.
‘I’m not going to tell you to march out and fight alongside the Sarnesh,’ Che explained to them. ‘It’s something much more important than that.’ She held up a hand quickly, though nobody had spoken. ‘And it’s not about Argastos.’ At the name, a ripple of disquiet ran through them. ‘The Empress seeks Argastos for his power, but that’s between me and her, and not your problem. But you do have a problem.’ She was looking about at them, peering amidst the trees as though trying to estimate just how many Mantis-kinden were listening, and Tynisa saw her bracing her shoulders. ‘Change,’ she announced. ‘You won’t change, yet the world must. Your nature is to fight, so you’ve tried to fight time just as you’d fight any other enemy. And you’ve lost, and been reduced to this — to this forest, these holds.’ The intensity of their regard was frightening, all those sharp eyes lancing into her, but Che took it in her stride.
‘We’ve come to the last sand in the hourglass, I think,’ she told them. ‘That’s what I have to tell you. Whether you fight for the Empress because she’s promised you your old glories back again, or because you agree with Imperial aims, or for any other reason, it doesn’t really matter. You already know her promises can’t be trusted, as much as I do. In your hearts, you do. And if you had subjugated yourselves to the Sarnesh, or even still obeyed the Tharen, it would make no real difference. You’d still be serving someone. Servants of the Green, that’s how the Moths used to put it. And maybe, in those days, doing what the Moths wanted was a good thing. They were great magicians and wise, after all. But it seems to me that ever since those days, you’ve just been waiting for them to return and tell you how to get it all back. And they haven’t, because they don’t know.’
Thalric had managed to find his way through to her by then, and when he rested a hand on her shoulder she squeezed it gratefully.
‘Then the Empress came instead, and I can understand why you’ve ended up fighting for her — because fighting is what you do, and because nobody had a better offer. Until now, I hope.’ She was speeding up a little, sensing that her claim on their attention might be shorter than she thought. ‘But I think that you never did quite believe her. Instead, she came as a sign — the sort of sign the Moths once prophesied of — a sign of the end. I have walked through your forest, and witnessed you and the Etheryen tearing one another apart. I have seen an entire hold slaughtered by its own kin, and I have felt the horror and despair that you all feel. The whole forest is rank with it. The Empress’s very arrival made you face the world, her world. She was something new that you couldn’t ignore. She gave you an excuse to die, and you jumped at it — for, in your deepest selves, you saw this as an escape from a world that had gone so far wrong as to create her. And me, too, I suppose. I’m certainly not something that the great magicians of old might have envisaged or approved of.’
She let the silence linger, and the Mantids were still angry and resentful but it was that sort of anger that only truth can provoke. Che’s words had sunk barbed hooks in them.
‘No matter what the Empress promises, the Days of Lore will never come again,’ said Che, in that silent glade. ‘And now that past is sufficiently far gone that it’s a Wasp who comes to broker deals with you as though she was one of your old masters — and a Beetle-kinden stands here to lecture you about what you should and shouldn’t do.’ She shrugged. ‘If you want to pass on, if the world’s so intolerable to you now, then that’s your right. The great Mantis tradition of the Lowlands could be snuffed out quite easily, if that’s what you want. All those centuries of history just gone, and by your own hands. If you want to make a start by cutting my throat, I can hardly stop you.
‘Because otherwise you have to change as the world has changed. Yes, it’s an Apt world, but it still recognizes Mantis-kinden fighting skill. There is a place for you in it, yet, if you’ll take it. Wait another generation, and maybe there won’t be. Maybe then a good death will be all you can hope for.
‘You must decide, all of you, whether you want to live. I won’t insult you by telling you that living is harder than dying, that continuing to fight is more worthy than a good end. I’m not Mantis, I can’t weigh these things for you.’
She took a deep breath. ‘But know that, if you pass from this world, you will be remembered. But it will not be in your old songs. Gone will be the stories you tell of your heroes, gone the legends of the Days of Lore. None will be left to tell the histories as you once told them. Instead, you’ll be remembered by my people. Can you imagine what Beetle-kinden stories of your people are like? Can you conceive just how wrong we get it all? How we turn all your glories and your tragedies into farce and bathos? And yet, if you are gone, nobody will ever know any better. Our clumsy Apt retellings will be all anyone ever knows of the Mantis-kinden.’
She seemed to shrink, then, before the gaze of her audience, discarding some invisible mantle of authority that she had donned simply to hold their interest. ‘I’ve said my piece,’ she finished. Then she reached out and hugged Thalric to her, plainly more glad than she could say to have him there. The others made their way over, too: Tynisa, Amnon, Maure. None dared break the silence, but she hugged each in turn.
There was a stir amongst the Nethyen. One of the older women was picking her way through them, her eyes fixed on the Beetle girl. Her hair was silver-white, but she stood straight and there was a rapier at her hip and spines jutting from her forearms.
‘Loquae,’ Che addressed her, for this must be one of the leaders of the Mantids.
The old woman regarded her with a mixture of hostility, respect and that fear of the magical that the Moths had taken pains to instil in their servants. ‘You, too, may as well style yourself Loquae here, although you have nothing but harsh words for us.’