Blood of the Mantis

The fight was apparently over, although Uctebri had not been watching it and had not noted which Ant had won. As people turned to talk to their neighbours, of sport or business or both, the Emperor leaned back. ‘Well, monster?’ he asked. ‘Do you appreciate the honour we have bestowed on you?’

Uctebri sucked a deep breath in through his pointed nose, savouring the last of the shed blood. ‘Indeed, your Imperial Majesty.’

‘Displease us, creature, and we may yet see you too in the pits.’

‘I fear, your Imperial Majesty, that I would make a poor spectacle.’

Alvdan snorted at that, and then turned to his left to relay the Mosquito’s words to his neighbour. The man sitting there was the influential General Maxin, who thought he was using Uctebri to court the Emperor’s further favour, just as Uctebri thought he himself had used Maxin to secure access to the Emperor.

Doubt and shadows, the very drink of magicians. Uctebri settled back, hearing someone above him say that the next fight would pitch a predatory beetle against a half-dozen slaves, and would therefore be good sport and worth watching.

After the entertainment was done it was for Alvdan to rise first, which he did without even a glance at the night’s anxious sponsors. The Wasp hegemony amused Uctebri. They set their Emperor up as inviolable and so far above them. Everyone else, officers in the army, scions of rich families or factors of the Consortium, all of them were within merely a pace of each other, and thus they jostled and fought for place. After the Emperor and his immediate retinue had gone, Uctebri knew there would be all kinds of elbow-jogging over who should follow next.

He had cast several narrow glances meaningfully at General Maxin as they left, and now the burly, grey-haired Wasp dropped back a pace to walk beside him.

‘You honour me with your attention, O General,’ said Uctebri with a sly smile.

‘You forget your place, slave,’ Maxin told him coldly. ‘What do you want?’

‘But you know what it is I want, General,’ Uctebri said humbly. ‘What I need, in fact, to bring his Great Majesty’s plans to fruition.’

‘Your box,’ Maxin snarled contemptuously. ‘I have my men travelling to Jerez even as we speak. You’ll soon have your trinket.’

‘However, General, so that I may be sure of it, I have asked a kinswoman of mine to attend at that place, and bend her own efforts to the same goal.’

‘You’ve had no chance to ask anything of anyone, slave,’ Maxin said, but there was no certainty in his voice.

‘Nonetheless, such a request has been conveyed.’ Uctebri watched the man’s face twitch uncomfortably. Was this not the most exquisite of pleasures? A general of the Rekef, whose spies and informers held the whole of the Imperial Army in terror for any question of their loyalty, and yet his heart trembled in facing a tired old slave. You have your host of agents, General, yet you cannot guess at mine.

‘Your kinswoman had best stay out of the way,’ snapped Maxin, bluffing unconcern. ‘My men do not know to expect her, so she is likely to get hurt before she can properly introduce herself.’

‘Why, General,’ Uctebri said, ‘what makes you think that they will even notice she is there, unless she wishes it?’

The Emperor still convened with his regular advisors as tradition demanded, but a new elite had now arisen. War was the word that buzzed through the chambers of power in Capitas. War was the meat and drink of the Empire. It was war that made careers and secured futures, that greased the wheels of commerce and reaped wealth and power for those who could ride on its swelling tide.

The Lowlanders did not understand, and could never understand, that the invasion of Tark, the Battle of the Rails, none of this actually constituted war. Skirmishes and expansion comprised the day-to-day business of the Empire, but it took resistance, a line drawn that the Imperial Army had to cross, to make it count as truly war.

The Lowlanders had now drawn that line: it ran crookedly from Merro to Collegium, from Collegium to Sarn. The Empire had engulfed almost half of the Lowlands before it had even become a war worthy of the name.

The Emperor walked amongst his generals, viewing the great map they had commissioned, first from this side, then from the other. It was a piece of art, that map, carved by the most accurate slave craftsmen. The mountains and the ridges, the rivers and the forests, they had all been laid in veneers of coloured woods, while the cities were bronze medallions cast especially, embossed with the name and emblem of each. Wooden blocks and little parchment flags showed the disposition of known forces currently under arms across the Lowlands.