Salute the Dark

She raised a hand before he could say it, even though she knew they could not be overheard. I cannot trust you, can I? She knew he must be planning to control her as a puppet ruler of his Empire. Still, he gives me more chance than my brother. ‘It seems very small,’ she said, archly disdainful. ‘I do wonder whether you do not throw this object in my way simply to amaze and mystify me.’

His grin broke out again now, within the confines of his hood. ‘My dear doubting princess, do you believe in ghosts?’

She made to say that of course she did not, but he was so plainly waiting for this response that she just gave him an uninterested shrug.

‘I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,’ he told her. ‘Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.’ His hand came out of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon.

‘If you say so.’

‘Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,’ he said patiently. ‘But when you think, it is different. Your thinking snarls the fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how very simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an enchanter.’ With a swift intertangling of his fingers, there was now a lumpy knot in the centre of the ribbon.

She managed to shrug again. ‘I cannot deny that you have a power, Mosquito. I cannot think to ever understand it – and I think it is better I do not.’

‘Perhaps.’ He grinned at her. ‘What happens, though, after you die? What happens to the knot?’ He pulled at the tape’s ends sharply, and the knot had vanished, as though it had never been. ‘Alas, unravelled in an instant, my princess.’ His grin was conspiratorial. ‘But what if it were not?’

‘I… do not understand.’

‘The body gone – dead, rotten, decay and then dust – but the knot of mind still there, trapped within the weave, impossible to undo.’ Now he was moving about the room, pinching out candle-flames between his fingertips, bringing on a gloom that she felt must match the evening outside.

‘I do not see how that can be.’

‘But then you do not understand any of what I say, for you merely see the convenient images I speak of,’ he said. ‘Laetrimae, would you come forth? Drama now requires it.’

Seda frowned at him. ‘What are you talking about.’

‘Drama indeed,’ said Uctebri. ‘Perhaps more than is required, but the Mantis-kinden were always a race prone to the grand gesture.’

It was chilly in the room, and the dark seemed to have grown more swiftly than the dying candles could account for but, most disturbing of all, Uctebri was looking behind her, past her shoulder at something else.

She turned, and screamed at what she saw there, falling backwards on to the floor of the mirror room and scrabbling to put more distance between herself and the apparition that had manifested between herself and the door.

It was a woman, tall and lean and pale, and clad in piecemeal plates that might have been armour or chitin, and her body pierced through and through with briars that twisted and arched and grew and impaled her over and over, and yet, despite it all, her face was calm and beatific and quite, quite insane.

‘Behold the greatest mistake of the Moth-kinden,’ hissed Uctebri, ‘the greatest knot in the weave of history, and a knot that will continue on and on and never be undone. She, however, is only their spokeswoman, my princess. There are a thousand others of them, snarled together like the vines that pierce her, and they are Mantis and Moth both, tangled and matted and interwoven. The creation of the single greatest act of magic ever known, and here I hold it in my hands.’

The tortured woman’s face had adopted a new expression, and Seda saw that it was loathing, and that it was directed entirely at Uctebri. She found that she sympathized with that emotion wholeheartedly.

* * *

Tisamon returned to his rented rooms feeling shaken and sick at heart.

It was not from the fighting, which had been the only part of it to make sense. After all, the complicity that existed between people trying to kill one another bred a brotherhood he had long been a part of.

They had converted a marketplace into an arena, the Wasps ordering the locals to tear down their stalls and put up ranks of tiered seating instead. It looked not so different from the Prowess Forum, of fond and distant memory. That was what he had expected, too: duels of skill, followed by polite applause. To a Mantis-kinden there was nothing inherently wrong in a duel of expertise that ended in death. It was the logical final expression of the art form, that was all.

What he had just been through was different, and soiled him in a way he could not have guessed at.