Heirs of the Blade Part 5

'You've spoken of this to Gaved, haven't you,' Tynisa guessed.

'He knows how I feel.' For a moment, the woman met her gaze, in a flash of personality that she would not have dared back in Jerez. 'I know he does not like you, nor you him, but he knows that to show you thanks and to repay my debt in some small way will make me happy. He is a good man.'

Tynisa tried to equate 'good man' with a renegade Wasp-kinden, and failed, but she said nothing, just nodded.

During the following days Gaved went fis.h.i.+ng, and Sef swam in the lake despite the cold. Tynisa's hosts were wary of her, and inside the house's small s.p.a.ce they managed to leave her to herself a surprising amount of the time. In turn, she did not know what to do with the hospitality they tentatively extended, but then she did not know what to do with herself either. She slept under their roof and she shared their food, which was cooked for them by a Gra.s.shopper girl from some nearby peasant family. Gaved was embarra.s.sed about it, or pretended to be, but he told her that the Salmae would not hear of one of their retainers s.h.i.+fting for himself, not even the least-regarded one. Tynisa was not sure whether to believe this or not.

Then the cold came, dispelling Tynisa's former a.s.sumption that it was already upon them. One evening she was in the outer room, practising her footwork as Tisamon had shown her. While she moved, she barely noticed the change, but as soon as she stopped, she saw that her breath was pluming pale in the suddenly chilling air. Outside, the darkening sky was crystal-clear, the stars like pinheads set in velvet. She was s.h.i.+vering even as she backed away from the small window, and a moment later Gaved slipped past her to fasten a shutter over it.

They retreated to the inner rooms and the hearth, closing themselves off from the surrounding s.p.a.ce, letting the cold prowl between the walls until it succ.u.mbed to the slow advance of the fire's heat. Even so, Tynisa slept in her hammock bundled up in two cloaks and a horse blanket, and still sensed the biting frost as though it was an enemy stalking outside the walls of the house, rattling the shutters and hunting for a way in.

It was hard for her to live thus in that double-walled house. Lying in the inner compartment at night, the outer house was busy with the sound of creaking wood and the battering of the wind. As the nights grew even colder, her mind grew tired of simply presenting her with shadow puppets of the dead, and diversified instead into footsteps so that she could lie there awake, with Gaved and Sef and their servant all asleep, and listen to Achaeos's shuffling tread, his nails sc.r.a.ping on the wall as though his figment was searching for a way in, out of the cold. But he has already gone to that final cold and, if he found his way in, he would bring it with him.

And she knew he was not with her, but was dead by her hand, and that she was slowly losing her mind over it, but she felt fear stealing up on her even so.

One morning she awoke and knew that something must be wrong. There was a peculiarity to the light that pried through the edges of the house. She slipped from her hammock, a motion she was now practised enough to be confident with, and ventured into the outer section of the house, wrapped in a blanket.

There was a strange pale glare showing at the edge of the shutters, and limning each panel of the walls, as though the light of the sun had swooped very close to the world, but without bringing any of its heat. Bewildered, Tynisa wrestled with one of the wall-panels, until she could move it aside.

She stared, caught utterly unawares by the sight. The world outside had died, and some vast hand had draped it in a shroud. Everywhere the contours of the land had been smoothed by a universal covering of white, flurrying whenever the wind picked up. The lake had shrunk: clear water still lapped at its centre, but a shelf of solid ice had reached out from the sh.o.r.e as far as Tynisa could make out. She stared at it all, awestruck in a way that she had not been since her childhood.

She realized that she was s.h.i.+vering, and withdrew into the house, where she found the servant eating some oatmeal for breakfast.

'Is that snow?' she demanded.

The girl looked at her as if she was mad.

'You've never seen snow before?' Gaved stepped out, pulling on a tunic as he did so. 'This won't last. Two, three days and it will melt, is my guess. Still, when winter really gets into its stride there'll be more.'

'Oh.' She found the prospect disappointing. The sight outside had seemed so utterly unprecedented to her that she had needed it to be universally significant, as though it was a sign of the end of the world. The blanched landscape had seemed to speak to her: I am changed, so shall you be. Something different is about to find you. Your life will not be the same. That was a message that she had badly needed to hear.

Sef came out too, then, wrapping a thick robe about herself, and Tynisa realized sourly that she and the Wasp had been busy in her absence. It was a bitter thought that the happiness of others should have become as hard to bear as freezing. Living with two people who were apparently content with one another was becoming untenable: they were forcing her either to feel her own solitude too greatly, or to find some excuse to look down on them for their lack of ambition and dearth of spirit.

A change did come, though, as if some part of her had turned magician and foreseen it. Past noon, with no sign of a thaw, and Sef spotted a rider approaching, around the rim of the lake.

The three of them gathered to watch as that single dark shape against an argent field resolved itself into a Dragonfly youth swathed in a russet cloak. There was a shortbow and quiver at his saddle, and the line of his cape was wrinkled by a short sword at his belt, but he approached them openly, his horse high-stepping in the snow, and when he drew nearer they saw that there was no bulge of armour beneath his cloak.

Tynisa's rapier was in her hand, quivering in readiness, but the rider barely glanced at it, which seemed the clearest indication that he was no enemy. Instead, when he had reached what he clearly felt was the boundary of Gaved's little fiefdom, he slung himself easily off the saddle, with just a flicker of wings, and waited there.

'Come closer,' Gaved called out to him. 'All friends here.'

The visitor bowed elaborately, his hands moving in arabesques that Tynisa a.s.sociated more with stage-conjurors than courtiers, but then both Salme Dien and Salme Alain had favoured the same kind of extravagance.

'I seek Maker T'neese.' Leaving his horse untethered and on trust, he stepped over towards them. He was very young, some years Tynisa's junior.

It took her a moment to disentangle what he had done with her name. 'That would be me,' she said.

The youth smiled brightly. 'My master has no wish to impugn the hospitality that you receive here, and places no obligation upon you, but if it be your pleasure, Lady Maker, you are invited to be the guest of Lowre Cean for whatsoever span of this winter you wish.'

The name meant nothing to Tynisa, but she saw its impact on her companions, and therefore concluded that this Lowre Cean was obviously important in some way.

'May I confer with my host?' she asked cautiously.

'As much conference as you should wish,' he allowed, 'though I'd ask for some feed and water for my mount, if I may?' This last, with raised eyebrows, was directed at Gaved and Sef. The Wasp turned back to the house, on the point of hailing their servant girl, but then some ghost of his old freelancer's pride overtook him and he set to the task himself, leaving Tynisa to trail after him.

'You're honoured,' Gaved told her, as he broke the ice on their water trough.

'Why's that? What's this about?'

'As to what it's about, no idea. The man's got a big old estate within Salmae lands, though, few days to the west of here. Couple of farming villages and his own compound, servants, soldiers, scholars, that sort of thing.'

'He's, what, a local chieftain? A bandit prince made good? What?'

Gaved uttered a strange sound. 'Don't seriously don't ever say that to anyone around here. Prince-Major Lowre Cean is probably the greatest war hero the Commonweal has. He was just about their only general who had any luck against the Empire, and he's also one of the Commonweal's greater n.o.bles, on a par with your friend Prince Felipe. So, no, he's not a bandit prince made good, or if he is, the making good happened a few thousand years ago, when the Commonweal was putting itself together.'

'Then what's he doing living inside the Salmae borders?' Tynisa asked him, somewhat put out at his obvious amus.e.m.e.nt. 'How can he be all that important? Why's he not even on his own lands?'

Gaved gave her a look, and she understood, feeling abruptly chagrined.

'Right,' he confirmed. 'The war. All gone. At least Felipe survived with the majority of his princ.i.p.ality intact. Cean lost his lands, all his people, children, grandchildren, everything. Now he's basically living on the charity of Prince Felipe and Princess Salme, and pretty much waiting to die.' His gaze appraised her. 'But for some reason he's taken an interest in you.'

'You think I should go?'

'I'd go myself, if he asked for me, only I imagine he's seen enough Wasp-kinden to last him for the rest of his life. I don't imagine he wants to murder you or force you into marriage, if that's what you're worried about.'

'I don't know what I'm worried about,' she told him, but at the same time something had stirred inside her. She realized she agreed with Gaved, that this did not look like trouble, and she realized also that danger was what she would have preferred. Even this, though, would be something. She had a new purpose, a new direction. It might keep her going for only a tenday, perhaps, but it was better than nothing.

The road to Lowre's home, his manse as the messenger described it, was longer than Gaved had told her to expect, although that was probably due to the enc.u.mbrance of the snow. Caught frozen in white, the Commonweal seemed like a dream place, or some make-believe land that some scholar might write a fanciful book about, a land unfinished, half shapeless and awaiting detail from some great moulding hand. They encountered precisely one other human being, a herdsman's daughter trudging through the snow as she followed the tracks of an errant aphid that had somehow escaped its pen and blundered off into the cold.

The world was white as a fresh page, Tynisa thought, and each living thing left a scrawl of writing that told all who cared precisely what manner of creature had pa.s.sed, and where it had gone. She herself had left a similar travelogue that stretched all the way back to Gaved's door, and would do so until it snowed again, or a thaw came.

At last, after several nights so cold that she and the messenger practically slept on top of each other inside his small tent, necessity easily overcoming propriety, the home of Lowre Cean presented itself. That day the sky was clear, and the snow around them starting to dissolve back into the earth, or so it seemed to Tynisa. The ground, which had been hard, now became muddy with it, and they had to pick their way carefully down towards the little walled village which Tynisa understood to be the exiled prince's home.

The scene within the walls was reminiscent of the aftermath of a siege. In the centre of the compound, a band of ferocious-looking warriors had built up a grand fire and were now singing raucously and handing round a skin of some potent liquor. They were long-haired and bearded, and wore furs and brightly dyed homespun, and Tynisa had no idea what kinden they might be, save a very noisy one indeed. Around them, a fair number of Dragonfly peasants hurried about, carrying bundles and buckets, lifting, cleaning, clearing and obviously doing their best to ignore their barbarous guests.

There were a dozen buildings within Lowre's little domain, and Tynisa was surprised to see that many of them were of stone, and not the ancient stone of the Commonwealer castles, but something more like the civilized architecture she was used to. One such was plainly a forge, from the ring of hammers issuing from it, but there were a couple of larger buildings of unclear purpose, although back home she would have labelled one as a workshop.

The prince's own home must be the largest structure there, its lower storey stone-built and the upper two constructed st.u.r.dily of wood. The general shape was borrowed from the local castles as Felipe's had been but unlike that fragile construction, Lowre had obviously retired here to somewhere that could be defended. Tynisa read in this that he was, in some way, still fighting the war.

The messenger, who had never volunteered his name, had a boy come and lead her horse away, then informed her that he would go find his master and announce her arrival. He left Tynisa standing somewhat bemusedly in the centre of the compound, with all the business of a n.o.ble's estate bustling away on all sides. One of the uncouth-looking warriors called out some unintelligible suggestion to her, and she glared at the lot of them, to their great amus.e.m.e.nt. Then there came a Roach-kinden man leading a string of horses, whom she was forced to stand aside for, which in turn put her in the path of a peasant woman, two buckets yoked over her shoulders, on her way to fill the water-troughs. One of the savages had meanwhile started up some ferocious howling noise which she realized belatedly was intended as a song, and from the far side of the buildings she heard a fierce chirring, as a pack of house crickets began stridulating in protest.

And then the messenger appeared at her elbow once again. 'My master will see you now.'

Lowre Cean was neither enthroned like a prince nor practising at arms like a warrior n.o.ble. Instead she found him in a strange room lined with little wooden hutches, each fronted with latticed wire, so that she a.s.sumed this man kept crickets or jewel beetles, both of them common pets back home. He was a tall old figure, his hair white and thinning, and his long face was creased by the echoes of a hundred strong emotions. He wore a long grey smock, looking nothing like a prince or a war hero. There was a sharp, sour smell about the whole room that was utterly unfamiliar.

'Maker Tynise, my Prince,' the messenger announced, then stepped back and away to leave the two of them alone.

Tynisa could only wonder at the way these Commonwealers seemed to have no fear of strangers bearing ill intent. Were there no a.s.sa.s.sins in Dragonfly-kinden history?

She was indeed no threat, or so she hoped. That cold rage had not touched her again since Siriell's Town. Perhaps this equally cold winter had put it to sleep.

'My lord.' She tried something like their type of formal bowing, got it wrong, but Lowre Cean was not watching. Instead, he was cupping something in his hands with infinite concentration. She took a step forward to get a look at the things in the cages, and recoiled back to the doorway with a yelp. She had never seen anything like them.

They were tiny enough to fit into the palm of his hand, and they were manic, leaping and darting inside their little boxes as though furious at their captivity. They had two stick-thin legs ending in little clawed hands, and ragged paddles for arms no, for wings, she realized, although they hardly seemed the right shape for taking to the air. Their little round heads had madly staring little round eyes and a beak like a tiny blunt dagger-blade, and their skin was furred with something a little like the scales of a moth's wing. They had been quiet, but her approach had set them off into a twittering, piercing cacophony of sound, a random and tuneless a.s.sault on the ear.

The lean old Dragonfly in their midst turned and gave her a wry smile. He was actually holding one of the vile creatures in his hands, a thought that made Tynisa's skin crawl. 'Forgive me,' she heard him say, over the racket. 'I had forgotten how my little pets are an acquired taste. My family has always bred these little singers, and since the war I have begun to devote more of my time to our old fancy here.' With infinite care he replaced his charge in one of the boxes and closed the grill, whereupon the little creature began yammering and twitching like all the others.

'You are Prince-Major Lowre Cean?' Tynisa began uncertainly. She had seen Felipe Shah eventually behaving like a prince, and Salma's mother most certainly like a particularly arch princess. This man was not conforming to her expectations.

'That is the curse I bear,' he confirmed, was.h.i.+ng his hands before removing his smock. Beneath it he wore a plain, pale robe, something even a servant would look drab in. 'And you are the Lowlander? Fascinating.'

'Please, master, why did you send for me?' she asked. 'How did you even know about me?'

'Why magic, of course. Your coming was foretold centuries ago.'

She goggled at him in astonishment, and it was only after he had stepped out of the menagerie that she saw how a mischievous twinkle had entered his tired eyes.

'Or perhaps it was a Fly-kinden messenger from Suon Ren bearing word from my old friend Felipe Shah,' he added. 'Shah believed that you might find yourself a little stranded here in Leose, so asked that I extend to you all hospitality due to an honoured amba.s.sador from the Lowlands.' For a man of his age he stood very straight, and despite his dress and circ.u.mstances she had a brief glimpse of the man he had been during the war. 'If you wish it, that is.'

Tynisa thought again of Salme Alain, who would no doubt return home sooner or later. She thought of Gaved and Sef, whose resources were meagre and who would doubtless prefer to retain their privacy over the winter.

More than that, though, she thought of Felipe Shah, and of this old man now before her, two Dragonfly n.o.bles whose war-wounds were borne on the inside, but who could still find charity for a stray Lowlander out of nowhere, penetrating all her angst and guilt and fretting about her purpose, she felt a moment's sunlight touch her.

'I wish it,' she told Cean with profound grat.i.tude.

Part Two.

The Widow.

Seven.

The Empire had no great tradition of receiving amba.s.sadors, yet these were not the first who had stood before Seda. They were the strangest, and most of her court did not know what to make of them. The great and good of the Wasp-kinden could not decide whether this was some kind of joke, or a calculated insult from an unknown power, on seeing these three cadaverous creatures standing before the throne.

The small proportion of her court who did understand what these visitors were, and what that signified, had gone quite still like a cricket that spots the twitch of a mantis amongst the leaves. Those were themselves newcomers, a strange detritus of the Inapt that Seda had been quietly cultivating since she had secured her throne against the other would-be emperors who had begun carving off pieces of her rightful domain after her brother's death. These other amba.s.sadors the Moth-kinden, the Gra.s.shoppers, scholars and mystics and magi stared at the three dark-robed creatures as though they were a nightmare come to life.

It was not just what they represented, that sparked such horror. Nor was it because these things were standing in the Empress's court in broad daylight, whose true place was in the furthest, darkest holes away from the wrath of civilized peoples. It was a fear that these creatures might have a proposal for Seda: a promise of power that would be both greater and darker than those sc.r.a.ps of support that the Moth-kinden had been trying to get the Empress to accept. The price that would be exacted, in return for their gift of tainted power, threatened to undo centuries of bitter history.

The Mosquito-kinden had come to Capitas.

Seda watched them curiously. She had known only one of their kind before, although that one still cast a long shadow even after his death.

They had come to her in her dreams, these three. She was not sure whether they were scapegoat delegates forced by their fellows to undertake this task, or perhaps the boldest and most ambitious of a people sly and retiring by nature; or whether they were renegades cut off from their own kin and seizing on her unique position for a chance of reprieve. It was in dreams, however, that they had made themselves known, whispering promises of power, of understanding, even a twisted kind of comfort, extending a helping hand to draw her from the sea of blood that they knew she must be drowning in.

In her dreams they had been huge and cloaked in the night sky, their gaunt faces commanding. She had felt tiny before them.

Before her now, they were shorn of such grandeur: three haggard, pallid things, wrinkled and s.e.xless. If it were not for those eyes, they would have seemed just some pack of ancient, mongrel beggars, not even worthy of the Slave Corps' time. But their protuberant and glistening red eyes dominated their every expression with a naked, hungry gleam. One of them, too, had a patch of red across his brow, like a birthmark save that it seemed to s.h.i.+ft fluidly as he glanced about the room in jerky motions.

There had been a war, she knew, for her adviser, Gjegevey, had told her that much. In some forgotten corner of the lost centuries, before her race had come into its own, the Moth-kinden, in their strength and wisdom, had broken the power of the Mosquitos, cast them down and saved the world from their thirst for blood and for dominion. Of course, as all the records were kept in their clever, grey-skinned hands, Seda had only their word for the rights and wrongs of it. As the Moths themselves were long since banished to a few mountain fastnesses by their own triumphant slaves, one might think the issue moot. Official Imperial history certainly did: the squabbles of the Inapt kinden in bygone days were not taught in Wasp schools.

She had surprised them, in the end, for as they had pillaged her dreams, whispering and promising, she had shown them only need and weakness, enticing them to creep from their haunts and converge on Capitas. Come to us, their voices had rustled in her mind. Be ours, sworn and sealed. How else will you ever control your new heritage?

When they were close enough to her walls, she had sent soldiers out for them with a polite but forceful invitation to the Imperial court. Here they were: three sc.r.a.ps of old night caught now in the daylight that her artificers funnelled into her throne room, through shafts and high-set windows. Had they come after dusk as they planned, they would have found no less of a glare from the gas lamps. She could see them flinching from it, all the progress and the newness, trying to steady themselves against the moving tide of history.

But she owed their kinden something, and that had earned them a public audience. Also, it did no harm to remind the Moths and the others that she was no creature's toy, not theirs, nor the Mosquitos'.

'You have travelled so very long to present yourselves to me,' she said now, looking down on them from her central seat. On each side of her throne were three lesser seats where her brother had seated his advisers, but these days she seldom shared her glory with anyone. Had her regent been here, then perhaps she would have permitted him a place beside her, but they told her he was dead in some far-off city. Oh, the lies they thought she swallowed, when she could see through them all.

The three Mosquito-kinden had no doubt pictured this meeting differently: they as the masters, and she the meek supplicant. Their obvious discomfort amused her. 'Speak,' she encouraged them. 'Surely such a great journey is of some great import. Have you a boon you wish to ask of me?'

Because they did not know precisely the corner they were backed into, or perhaps because they did, they found their courage from somewhere. One, the oldest and most haggard of the lot, stepped forward.

'Empress,' he began, his voice quiet yet carrying, which was an old trick of the Inapt. 'Your most royal Majesty, you know who we are. The name of the Mosquito-kinden is not foreign to you.'

Seda heard the murmur echo about her court, among the Apt segments of it anyway. There were many there who still clung to the idea that the Mosquitos were nothing but a myth to frighten children with, either lost to time or merely a fiction from the start. There were enough, though, who remembered the Emperor Alvdan's favourite slave, red-eyed and hungry-faced, a creature akin to these. Uctebri the Sarcad, he had called himself, and few recalled him fondly. Perhaps a few there even knew something of Uctebri's appet.i.tes, of the servants and slaves he left pallid and shaking, and sometimes dead and withered, in his wake. In this new age of a young empress, perhaps it was time for the people of the Empire to reconsider their beliefs, Seda thought.

She had essayed a cautious nod, and the Mosquito-kinden spokesman took this as encouragement. 'We bring you gifts,' he claimed. 'Gifts not of simple treasures, for who could match the treasury of an empire, but gifts of understanding. We see the old faces here at your court, of those who have persecuted and oppressed us throughout the ages. No doubt they claim that they will give you wisdom. We know all too well their narrow-minded creed, Majesty. They will piece out knowledge to you with a parsimonious hand, and pa.s.s you only those sc.r.a.ps from their table that they think you fit for. They would presume to judge an empress, believing that their own power is anything but a shadow in these days.' The visible reaction of those he railed against emboldened him further. 'Majesty, we are a people in hiding, for they would slay us even now, if they could. Let us serve you, let us teach you our lore, let us be your mentors in all the old ways. You shall find us more open-handed by far than these.'

He waited, but she let herself seem thoroughly absorbed by his words, perhaps a little cowed by them. He shuffled closer, until her guards tensed, and she lifted a hand to hold them back. She let the gaunt, robed figure approach until its hushed next words would be lost to most of her court, intended only for herself.

'Majesty, we know what has happened to you, and what inheritance has come to rest within you. The Moths may claim it, but you must know they lie. Perhaps there are some dregs of their power in you, but Uctebri was your master, before now, and it is his tradition that has claimed you our tradition. Who else can teach you of it, save us? And what will become of you, if you do not learn our ways?' His lips quirked into a smile, showing the translucent needles of his teeth. 'Or do you think the might of an empire is sufficient to master what lies within you?'

She stood up abruptly, and her court fell silent even as she did.

'You are in error,' she said, letting the soldiers and magnates of her court try to piece together precisely what words she was replying to. 'You recall to us our brother's slave, whom you claim as kin. You think to presume upon our favour through his name? I will not deny I knew him, and a cunning trickster he was, whom my brother found an endless fascination. Until he died, creature until my dear, beloved brother was murdered.'

She sensed the tension all around her now, for this had been a topic brought out frequently in recent months. 'Though a fighting slave held the blade, no single man could suffice to make an end to my brother,' she said, and she had practised the emotions so well that n.o.body could have guessed how much she had laughed, the first time she mouthed those words. 'We are even now uncovering the depths of the conspiracy that contrived his death.' It was remarkable, how far that conspiracy had spread, starting from a Rekef general and a Mantis-kinden pit slave and then working outwards, like a plague caught by those who had incurred the Empress's displeasure, that was uniformly fatal. 'We know, though, for our Rekef has confirmed it, that at the heart of the knot was none other than my brother's slave, so trusted and so well placed to betray the throne. You come here thus on a traitor's business.'

Even as she finished speaking, the guards were moving in, but she was more interested in the peculiar sea-change affecting her courtiers. They were not themselves under the lens none of them would be hauled off to the fighting pits or the crossed pikes today and so abruptly they started putting on expressions of vengeful outrage, and looking forward to some entertainment.

'We shall see them meet a fitting end, for the blood their kind has shed,' she declared. 'Have them hung by their heels, then have them bled by the wrists until not one drop remains within them.' And she did not now say, and have that blood brought to me, but there were those of her staff who knew the drill, and went about her business with fat purses and lips sealed, lest they, too, encounter the same fate. The Mosquitos understood, though, for she saw it in their red eyes. 'Do not a.s.sume,' she told them, 'that I am not fully educated as to your traditions.' Though her court would not understand, it was worth it for their expressions, before they were hauled away.

Invisible to her, there were some hundreds of people making ready within the palace and all across the city. Quartermasters, officers, engineers, chandlers, scouts, cartographers, diplomats, merchants and an army of slaves were smoothing her way so that the Empress's path should be effortless, greased as it was with the sweat of all their brows.

Her brother Alvdan had never set foot outside the capital. If he had been able to avoid it, he had never left the palace, the scene of his one mean triumph where he had ordered the murder of his siblings at the hands of General Maxin. That the late and unlamented Maxin was now a keystone in the grand and convenient 'conspiracy' that Seda had woven around her brother's death was a source of constant entertainment to her.

The Empire was changing, she knew. Its recent history, even its defeats, had strengthened it and broadened it, and she was not content to sit at home and merely try to fill her father's shoes, the ones that her brother had tried on for size so many times and found too large for him.

My grandfather Alvric unified the tribes and defeated our nearest neighbours, and he was great in one way. My father Alvdan the First built an empire, and was great in another. My poor brother's failing was in never finding his own path to greatness, but living off the table sc.r.a.ps of our family history. I have my own road now. And she did, and her forebears would never have guessed at it.

From the shade of her rooms she stepped out on to a balcony, into the bright sunlight, looking down the tiered flanks of the palace, over Capitas the golden city. The sky above it teeming with Wasps and Flies engaged on her errands, the streets coursing with her subjects, warehouses crammed with her treasures, barracks thronging with her armies. Above and to either side of her balcony, several of those soldiers tensed as soon as she showed herself, instantly casting their gaze skywards, in case any of her loyal subjects should harbour conspiratorial designs. Wasp Art furnished its devotees with wings and hands that were deadly at a distance, and for the Empress to stand thus in the open would be a gift to any a.s.sa.s.sin, which perhaps explained the late Emperor's reclusive habits.