Blood of the Mantis

Uctebri showed his teeth, either in grimace or grin. He had little enough hair, in truth, and his scalp gleamed in the candlelight.

‘Or have you decided to support my brother after all? It wouldn’t surprise me, given that he is Emperor already. What can I offer against that? Perhaps this has been his game to tempt me into treason.’

‘On his slightest word, you would die, Princess,’ Uctebri said. ‘Games, he might play, but he has no need to see any proof of your perfidy. It is not as though his fraternal love for you restrains him.’

‘That it does not,’ she agreed. ‘So what, magician? What has got into you?’

He said nothing for a moment, just went on lighting candles. Then: ‘You make a remarkable show tonight, Princess. I had not asked it of you.’

‘Should the spirits of fate not see me at my best? You have prodded and pried and measured me all this while, but now you say there are tests still to come.’

‘It is now time to make my real test,’ Uctebri said, as he lit the final flame. His expression, shifting and flickering with the light, looked doubting as he turned it on her. ‘All this time I have informed your brother of the tests I have conducted on you, some of it true, some false, but for me this is the real test – and you must pass.’

She felt a sinking in her heart. That was what was now different about the man: he was, for once, entirely serious. Gone were the coy insinuations, the mockery, even the grotesque flirtation he seemed to indulge in. Now he had become Uctebri the Sarcad, a magus of the legendary Mosquito-kinden, and he was about to determine her future.

‘And if I fail?’ she asked. She was used, through long experience, to appear calm in these times of trial. Her brother had put her through enough practice already.

‘Then you will be of no use to me. We will be of no use to each other. I shall instead make what I can out of your brother’s inferior clay.’ She thought she heard genuine regret in his tone. He would far rather it was me. Can I take comfort from that? She could not because, in her prolongedly precarious state, there was no comfort to be had from any source.

‘Make your test, then,’ she told him. ‘What must I do? Run? Jump? Do you wish me to sing to you, monster?’

‘My test has already begun. I simply require you to watch me and listen. I will know, after I am done, whether you are my suitable material or not.’

‘But all you’ve done so far is light candles…’ she observed.

‘Yes, so many candles.’ He moved about the room, seemingly aimless. The myriad darts of light confused her eyes. It was impossible to even tell where the walls were now, such was the multiplication of reflections. Surely he had stepped beyond this room somehow, she kept thinking, but then he would turn, and she had to take it on faith that there was a wall there that had turned him.

He was reflected alongside the constellations of candle-flames, of course, but as she watched she felt her stomach start to turn, because she could not quite match them to him, some were too far, others too near. ‘Sarcad…’ she whispered, ‘what are you doing?’

‘Magic,’ and he continued his pacing. ‘Do you hear me?’

‘Of course I hear you,’ she said, and felt that, even as she spoke, her words were covering some other voice that had given answer to the same question.

‘We are at the crux,’ Uctebri said, and she was surer than ever that he was not actually talking to her. ‘Come now. Make yourselves apparent.’ His tone was still low, almost conversational. Shrouded in his dark robe he seemed to appear and disappear as he turned towards and away from her, his face pale in the candlelight, until she had lost track of which was the real Uctebri, and which were merely the reflections.

The reflections…

She concentrated her gaze on the marble of the floor beneath her because it was the one keepsake left of the room she had walked into. She had only the hard sense of it beneath her feet, for her eyes now saw just a distant perspective of lights and darkness and the scrawny faces of the Mosquito-kinden, and her ears told her that the space about her was vast, with distant, forlorn winds channelling forever through twisted passages…

The reflections were all solely of him. There were none of her at all.

‘Be not shy,’ Uctebri murmured. ‘We must risk much so as to gain more. Come to me. Come now.’