Eleven
Her name was Xaraea and she had been the first to see this coming.
That was the joke, really, because she was such a poor seer. Like any Moth-kinden of standing she had learned the mouldy principles of magic, but she had never had any particular gift for it. She lacked that specific kind of concentration that made it possible to pluck apart the weave of the world and then reknit it as she wished. She would never be a true magician, and that meant, in the hierarchy of Tharn, that there was a ceiling above which she could never fly.
Yet here she was and the future of her city – of her world – rested on her shoulders. She had her own talents, she had found: her own sort of concentration. While her peers had studied the workings of the universe, her lessons had been in human nature: politics, commerce, all the strings that bound each individual to each other. Xaraea had played the games of the Spider-kinden, even served as ambassador to them for three years, learning the trade of deception from the mistresses of the art. In short, she was Arcanum: the secret cult of spies and agents through which the Moth-kinden gathered their secrets, and feuded amongst one another.
They had found uses for her talents other than magic. She had a good mind for logic. She had intuition. She had a deft hand, too, that could be turned to many tasks. She had undertaken her first murder on her twentieth birthday. The victim had been another Moth who had never known that he had been judged and condemned. Such were the games of the Arcanum.
The Arcanum: it was a word merely whispered throughout the remnants of the Moth culture. Many other races had their spies and agents acting as their sword against treason and their shield from enemy eyes. The Dragonflies had their Mercers and the Empire its brutal Rekef, but the Arcanum was the oldest secret service of them all, so encrusted with traditions and exceptions that it barely qualified as such. It was a blade in the hands of any Skryre that cared to take it up, and it had been turned inward more often than not in the silent, secret struggles that the Moth elders waged upon each other, murder and blackmail and espionage based on prophecy and ancient philosophy.
When the Wasp Empire had commenced its Twelve-Year War against the Commonweal, the Moths had finally begun to take notice. Not till then, nor even as recently as a month ago, had most of them considered that this extreme might come: Tharn at the Empire’s mercy. Xaraea’s patrons had shown more foresight, though. Out of curiosity and divination, they had set her the task of finding a shield against the Empire.
Xaraea had gone into the Empire twice, masquerading as a slave, trying to understand this vital, bloody-handed new power emerging into the world. Her exit, with a faked death enacted each time to stave off their hunters, had brought back to Tharn more information than it knew what to do with. In the Days of Lore, her race had been noted for its understanding of the minds of others, but that faculty had atrophied ever since the revolution.
She had gone into that Empire and studied its workings, and sought out contacts, and installed her agents amongst the slaves and subjects of the Wasps. She had put out her feelers delicately, seeking some solution to the grinding advance of the imperial armies that would come to Tharn sooner or later. Delicately, through intermediaries of intermediaries and by the most fallible means possible, Xaraea had constructed the faintest outline of a solution.
How it had all come home now: Xaraea the intelligencer and spy, whose fragile plan would either save or doom her city.
It was bright day outside but the city had not gone to bed. Instead she looked out of the window, shielding her eyes.
The sky was full of airships. There were other flying machines, too, landing out in the fields, digging great ruts across them. Wasp soldiers swarmed in a cloud about them, and one by one they were dropping to perch on the countless balconies and the statues, or cling to the carved reliefs. Their hands were extended in open-palmed threat, but the people of Tharn stood patiently and offered them no harm, made no suggestion of resistance. Not a blade nor a bow could be seen. After all, what good would they be against the artificers’ weapons that bedecked the flying machines?
Because it was her plan, Xaraea had to go down there to see if this desperate, infinitely unlikely clutching at fate could be made to serve them. She spread her dark wings and pushed off through the window, descending in a slow spiral to meet the rulers of the Wasps.
The new Governor of Tharn was arriving.
The Wasp felt a steadying as the airship’s painter-lines were lashed to whatever could be found to secure them. He supposed that meant statuary and embossed carvings. If there was a strong wind tonight then there would doubtless be a few headless effigies amid the friezes of Tharn in the morning.
He was merely thirty years of age, and only a major. For one of his age and that rank, this honour was unheard of. True, he had been helped on his way, like a man boosted up over a wall by his fellows, but he had worked hard for it, too. He might have his handicaps, but they had taught him guile and craft until he had become as nimble a manipulator of opinion as anyone within the Empire.
His name was Tegrec, and he had been given the governorship of Tharn.
Of course that did not mean the Empire regarded Tharn highly, since the Moth hold was viewed as some kind of rustic appendix to Helleron, without industry, without wealth, without even a dependable source of labour, the Moth-kinden being a slim and feeble race. He had fought for this post, but had not had to fight too hard once his name was on the right lips. In that, he had been helped along.
‘All secured, Major,’ said Raeka, his body slave. Tegrec went nowhere without his slaves, most especially his constant attendant Raeka, a slight, dark-haired Wasp woman, not pretty but clever and loyal. Behind him stood his personal guards, a brace of Mantis-kinden he had bound to him by understanding and manipulating their system of honour. They were prepared to be his slaves simply because he had assured them that, whatever else the Empire believed, he would never treat them as such. With such a concession he had won their hearts and minds.
His reliance on his slaves and his refusal to travel without them had given him a reputation in the Empire for decadence and a willingness to impose his power on others. Of course, they did not know of his handicap, his burden and his joy, that made all this so necessary.
I have been waiting for this moment for a score of years at least. Dare I call it fate? Perhaps I do.
Major Tegrec made a gesture and Raeka opened the door for him, turning a wheel and swinging out the disc of metal-rimmed wood. He could hear the not-quite-silence of several hundred Wasp soldiers waiting for him and, beyond them, in silence absolute, the Moths…
One of his Mantis bodyguards stepped out first, casting a suspicious eye over invaders and locals alike. He wore his clawed gauntlet, the blade folded back along his arm. Then it was Tegrec’s turn, and he paused in the gondola’s hatchway, seeing his invasion force snap to attention and salute. No need for any of you, it seems, he thought. Are you relieved not to have to go down into those tunnels and passageways to root them out? Or disappointed that there’s to be no rape and plunder? He made sure they had a good look at him, standing there with one foot on the rim of the hatchway, one hand on the circular door, his non-regulation blue cloak, secured by a golden brooch, billowing heroically in the wind. Tegrec the conqueror, the only major ever to be made a city governor. An unassuming figure, really, which was why he wore the cloak, the gold armlets and the torc, all to convey the image of a rather greater man. In truth his hair was starting to recede and he was thicker at the waist than a Wasp soldier should really be, and not quite as tall as most. No matter, his soldiers and the Tharen Moths would only remember this moment of his arrival.