Salute the Dark

‘It must be now,’ he said. ‘I have wrestled with fate too hard just to get my players to the wings. I cannot stand back and let it all go to ruin.’

‘The risks are too great,’ said another, a whispering woman’s voice. ‘The Empire…’

‘Is the prize, in case you had forgotten,’ Uctebri supplied. ‘Temporal power, at last, and after so long,’ Uctebri said.

‘If they uncover you… If you fail… We have not the strength or the numbers to resist them or to survive another purge.’

‘They are savages,’ Uctebri snarled. He could feel his blood, that borrowed and mingled commodity, rising inside him: only his own people could ever provoke him so. ‘How would they find us? These are not the Moth-kinden, to understand our hearts, or the Spiders, to ensnare us. They have no understanding of the old days. If they recoil against us I shall pay the price, I alone.’

‘You cannot be so sure of that,’ another said. ‘The girl, she may know more than you realize.’

‘You have taught her too much,’ said yet another. Uctebri glared at them all. For a moment he saw them as they would seem to an outsider: a conclave of thin and twisted creatures, sickly and cowardly after so many centuries of hiding.

‘I have come too far now to cry “Hold”,’ he hissed at them. ‘So what would you have me do? Wait another year, perhaps? Burrow into the Empire like a maggot into rotten flesh, never to find the heart? You have been too long in the dark. The girl is mine, and all that she possesses is my promise. She has lived under the shadow of her brother’s knife all her life, so she will take what I give her, and do what I say, just for a chance to be rid of that doom. What is she, but a woman in a race where the men lead? She will not be able to rule without our aid. We will make her our puppet, and the Empire, all its youth and strength and blood, will be ours to tug at.’ Greed was the key here, he knew. His was a greedy race, and it had always been so. ‘What might we do, with such a beast under our spur? Do we not have scores to settle with the world? Are we not owed? What vengeance might we exact on our old foes, with all the armies of the Empire at our disposal?’

They shuffled and turned to one another, and he felt his fingers crooking into claws with frustration.

‘If we had known-’

‘You knew,’ he addressed them all. ‘My plan has been years in the making. You all knew what I intended, and for the good of us all! Only now, when I am on the cusp, do you cringe away from grasping it.’ He drew himself up straight. ‘It matters not,’ he decided. ‘I do not need to care what you all think. I am in too far, now, to draw myself from the wound. I needs must suck it dry. If you will not share the feast, so be it. But I have no doubt that when I have the Empire in my hand, you shall come begging on your knees for a share.’

They fell very silent then. The Mosquito-kinden were close-knit out of necessity, surviving by mutual conspiracy. The censure of the many was always enough to govern the few, or so it had been for longer than any of them had been alive.

‘You will bring ruin on us,’ one of them said slowly. ‘You are become too proud.’

‘And you are not proud enough,’ Uctebri retorted. ‘Where is the race that once battled with magi and great scholars to be the masters of the world? Is there nothing left of that ambition? Has our defeat so long ago crippled us, even until today? Well, not I. I shall grasp the Empire with both hands and make it do my will. I shall be shadow-Emperor behind the girl’s throne, and in a hundred years from now – three generations of theirs but within a single lifetime for us – we shall walk openly in their streets, and speak counsel to their leaders, and perhaps we will no longer remember what craven things we had once become.’

With an impatient thought, he severed his link to them. Worms, all of them, pallid, soft things hiding away from an enemy that had suffered its own catastrophic reversals some five centuries before. The world needed a stronger hand to master it, and that hand was his. He considered his prote?ge?e, the Wasp princess. At this moment he felt she showed more promise than all the rest of his kinden put together. And you will be mine, heart and soul. You will sell your people’s future, your own will, in exchange for the empty reward of a throne. The thought cheered him, the nearness of all he had worked towards. His puppets were now all in place and ready to dance for him.

* * *

That she was so reliant on others was frustrating to her, but then it had always been so. To compensate, Seda had developed the ability to persuade others to do those things for her that almost any other member of her race could simply have reached out and accomplished in person.