Mistress of the Empire (40 page)

Assassination in any form was a dishonor, both to the victim and, if the truth were found out, to the family who paid for the deed. The scroll recovered by Arakasi contained enough sensitive information to plunge the Empire into a chaos of feuding families, all vengeance bent, as Hokanu was.

But that Kamatsu should have died by an assassin’s dart was an outrage she could not let pass. Her words were hard as barbarian iron as she said, ‘My husband, we have no choice. A way must be found to evade the Assembly’s edict and bring down Lord Jiro of the Anasati.’

‘For Ayaki’s sake also,’ Hokanu broke in. Never would he forget the sight of the boy’s dying, with the huge black gelding broken with him.

‘No.’ Mara’s word held gentle regret. ‘For Ayaki we have already paid.’ And, tears in her eyes, she told Hokanu of the Obajan’s personal feud with House Acoma, brought about by a forgery of Arakasi’s that had caused five Minwanabi servants to be put to death, to end a past threat of enemy spying. ‘The tong took offense at the Acoma,’ she finished. ‘It acted on its own initiative to end my line, operating beyond the scope of the contract agreed to with Tasaio of the Minwanabi.’ Her last sentence came bitterly. ‘They failed. The Obajan is dead, fittingly, by Arakasi’s own hand.’

Hokanu stared at her, hard as flint with her motherhood forgotten in the face of dark thoughts and bloody politics. Kasuma fretted at the lack of attention, her face screwed up in the beginnings of a loud cry. ‘My wife,’ he said, saddened, and angered, and frustrated by the injustices of life, ‘let us go home.’

His heart went out to her as her eyes turned to him, liquid with unshed tears. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let us go home.’

But it was not of the beautiful lakeside estate that she thought as she said the word, but of the wide pastureland estate where she had grown from childhood. Suddenly, strongly, irresistibly, she wished to return to the lands of her family. She wanted familiar surroundings, and the memories of her own father’s love, and a time before she had first tasted the heady wine of power and rule. Maybe on the land of her birth she could come to terms with the heartache and her fears for the futures of both House Acoma and House Shinzawai.

Mara sighed.

Hot, tired and discouraged after her journey to the original Acoma estates, she found relief from the noon sun in the cho-ja tunnels, a nearly forgotten haven. Her marriage to Hokanu and the close-knit rapport shared between them had come to replace her need for such solace. But before that, in her early years as Ruling Lady, the spice-scented dimness of the underground passageways, with their scurrying workers, had provided a sense of protection when seemingly insurmountable dangers had oppressed her on all sides.

Yet her perils then had been from the plots of human foes. Overwhelming as her straits had seemed, unpleasant as her first marriage to an Anasati son had been at the time, she could not have imagined the trials that would beset her this day. Physical abuses had been replaced by wounds of the spirit, a betrayal by the only man who truly understood her heart. Whatever underhanded injury Jiro of the Anasati might contrive in the future, her true enemies were the magicians, who might on a whim annihilate the Acoma name, even to memory of its existence. And it was their edicts that sheltered Jiro as he plotted.

Kamatsu’s murder had left a hard knot of rage in Mara’s chest. Fears that must never be spoken of for Tsurani and house pride caused a constant grinding of teeth. Mara had felt this way before as she faced enemies, but never over so long a period, and never for stakes so high. All that she loved was in jeopardy. Since Ayaki’s loss, stress had become familiar to the point where she
had forgotten what it was to sleep and dream without nightmares.

The subterranean dimness shielded her. Isolated within her own silence, but not alone, she relaxed as her litter moved deeper into the familiar tunnels of the hive. Her bearers jostled past the bustling cho-ja, surrounded by the high-pitched commands of soldiers, and the clashing ring of chitinous forearms as patrol leaders slapped their midsection in salute to her retinue. Knowing her surcease was only temporary, Mara surrendered to the illusion of relief. For a space, she felt restored to past days when her responsibilities and her heartaches had been few. Her inner barriers loosened and moisture gathered in her eyes. She bit her lip, but did not blot away her tears. In the cho-ja hive, scantily lit by the violet-blue glow of light globes, her weakness would pass unnoticed. The worry, the frustration, the daily ache of her helplessness to redress the wrongs done her family by the Anasati, combined to oppress her. She could deny her emotions no longer. The death of two children, the break in rapport with her husband and closest confidant, threatened to overwhelm her.

The years when Mara had grown in confidence and ability to control any situation seemed empty. Her emergence to dominance in the time-honored Game of the Council became a false achievement, the edict of the Assembly at a stroke preventing the established ways of avenging wrongs against honor. Politics and intrigues had taken a turn down nontraditional paths. The advantage that Mara had always enjoyed, a willingness to break with convention, was now lost to her, as every Ruling Lord in the Empire scrambled to contrive new means to dominate ancient rivals.

The old ways had all been upset.

Even the destruction of the Hamoi Tong, and the clear knowledge of where Jiro’s true culpability lay, brought little relief. For although one menace to the Acoma had been
ended, the Great Ones yet prevented her from avenging a deep insult to honor.

Mara’s return trip by river barge to the homelands of her ancestors had been a stopgap effort to set hurt and confusion at bay because, in truth, she had no sane place to seek solutions to the dilemmas that beset her.

Mara closed her eyes, rocked by the slight sway as her bearers wended their way downward into the tunnels. The air here was warmer, thick with the alien scents of the hive. Light globes were spaced at wider intervals, and the throngs of scurrying workers thinned. The tramp of humans’ sandals became more prevalent than the click of chitinous claws. Mara knew her retinue must be nearing the Queen’s cavern. But the route was no longer entirely familiar. Since her last visit, walls and arches that had been roughly hewn were now polished smooth, or carved and overhung with richly dyed hangings. If the arrangement of colors and tassels was unusual to human eyes, the effect was prosperous. The differences here seemed strangely at odds with impressions like untouched memory. But for the silver hair beginning to show at her temples, Mara might have been revisiting her girlhood. The house where she had played as a child, where she had first married and given birth, and acquired her taste for power, had initially appeared the same – until she remembered with a hollow stab to her stomach that silence ruled where once a young son had run roistering through the corridors.

She had felt a pang of loneliness. Ayaki was not the only loved one lost to her. The all too familiar surroundings brought heartache along with solace. By the gods, how she longed to see Nacoya, her onetime nurse and First Adviser, whose scolding and sage advice had more often than not averted disaster. Another trail of tears seeped from Mara’s eyes as she thought of her red-haired barbarian, Kevin of Zun, who had taught her the meaning of love and
womanhood in the kekali gardens here. Although Kevin had often infuriated her with his headstrong, mannerless ways, and Nacoya’s fussy proprieties had sometimes been a hindrance, she missed them both. The understanding she had shared with Hokanu, which had grown to replace those lost relationships, had seemed a bastion of infallibility, until now. A shadow lay between them since his misgivings over the birth of his daughter. Still angry with him, Mara rubbed her cheeks on her fine silk cuffs. The fabric would water-stain, but she did not care! It had taken the near obliteration of her line to make Hokanu see her need to name Justin as Acoma heir. That she had needed to suffer the loss of their firstborn infant to convince him had caused less pain than this!

Now Hokanu’s incomprehensible reluctance to accept Kasuma as Shinzawai firstborn was building another wall between them. A son, and only a son, would satisfy him, so it seemed. As if she could not bear a boy child in the future, Mara raged bitterly; or as if he were not free to exercise his right as Ruling Lord to lie with a dozen concubines to give him issue. No, the message behind his behavior was hurtfully clear: what he could accept in his wife he found unimaginable in a daughter, that a woman could be worthy of ruling a great house.

As she had so many times in the past when disheartened by despair, Mara had entered the cho-ja tunnels seeking an alien perspective, a different point of view that could give rise to new ideas.

A light touch roused Mara from reminiscence; Lujan nodded ahead, reminding that her retinue had reached the chamber of the Queen.

As her litter was borne through the final arch, with its squatting rows of sentries so still they might have been polished black statues, Mara composed herself. Entering the huge cavern, she used an old, silent meditation chant
to shed her smoldering resentment. When at last her bearers lowered her down before the grand dais, she had recovered her proper decorum.

The cho-ja Queen dominated the chamber, her bulk supported by a massive pedestal of earth. Mara remembered how tiny the Queen had been when they had first met, far away in the hive where she had been hatched. The delicate creature had matured, coming to her full growth within the first year of her accouchement at the Acoma estate. Now she bulked many times the size of her attendants, dwarfing even the largest of her warriors, with just her upper torso and head retaining their original size. Workers scurried around her mammoth body, keeping her clean and comfortable, as she produced the eggs that provided the different classes of cho-ja: warriors, workers specialised in any of a dozen different crafts, and, should the hive became prosperous to the point of overcrowding, a new queen.

Mara gave a bow of the head, as was proper between equals.

‘Greetings, Lady of the Acoma, Servant of the Empire,’ said the Queen, her high-pitched tones clear over the bustle of workers in the gallery.

‘Honors to your hive, Queen,’ answered Mara as Lujan provided a hand to guide her to the cushions waiting for her. The rapidity of cho-ja communication was still a mystery to Mara; somehow the Queen always seemed to know in advance of her arrival, and as much could be determined, the hive ruler seemed to enjoy these visits. Mara had ceased trying to understand the cho-ja in human terms; living with an outworld barbarian had taught her that persistently seeing through Tsurani eyes kept her blind to refreshing insights.

While Lujan oversaw the placement and disposition of her honor guard, her servants laid out sweets and Midkemian tea for her refreshment, and also to share
with cho-ja factors. Against Jican’s pessimistic predictions after the poisoning by the false Midkemian trader, Mara had developed a fondness for the pungent drink. Never one to waste an opportunity, she had overcome her personal misfortune and had cornered the market in tea, coffee, and chocolate.

Once the banalities of tea-tasting and trade were concluded, the Queen tilted her head in what Mara had come to interpret as inquiry. ‘What cause brings you to us, Lady Mara? The delicacies you have brought as samples could as easily have been sent by runner.’

Mara floundered for a reply. Her hesitation was unusual enough that Lujan broke his warrior’s formality to glance askance to ascertain nothing was amiss. Made aware by his lapse that her quiet might be misinterpreted as duplicity, Mara chose honesty, though she risked appearing foolish. ‘I had no set purpose, beyond a need for your wisdom.’

The Queen was silent. Around her, the attendants scurried on about their tasks. The guard warriors remained squatting in immobility, but Mara knew how swiftly they could move upon command. Uneasy lest she transgress some alien point of etiquette, she resisted an impulse to follow up with excuses. If she should cause offense, and then show weakness before cho-ja strength, she might never escape these tunnels alive.

As though the Queen sensed her guest’s discomfort, she said, ‘Many of your concepts are unknowable to us, Lady of the Acoma. This you name “wisdom” is such a thing. Your human tonalities indicate an idea handed down from a past generation to a mind of less life experience. Forgive me, I do not wish to imply that our kind are in any way superior to yours, but our consciousness is not isolated. The hive mind we share by your terms would span millennia. To us your perspective is fleeting, tied as it is to the duration of one human life. Insomuch as we cho-ja can share a
thing outside our understanding, we shall seek to give our aid.’

Here the Queen folded her tiny, vestigial forelimbs, to indicate patience and an attitude of waiting.

Mara stared unseeing into the dregs of her tea. She was aware that a cho-ja’s individuality was never separated from the hive mind; personal autonomy played no part in their culture, and only centuries of interaction between species had allowed the insectoids to conceptualise any sense of a human identity apart and alone from the whole. Individuality, to hive thought, held puzzling and conflicting ironies. The concept of foolishness, of someone acting against his own best interests or those of his family, seemed an insanity of irredeemable proportions to cho-ja perspective. And without foolishness, Mara thought wryly, the process of human learning could hold no meaning; the abstract term ‘wisdom’ became too ephemeral for the hive mind to grasp.

Mara frowned, and tried afresh. ‘In my brief experience, your counsel and that of other humans has taught me I live in a small world. Until recently, I thought I had some control over that world.’ She need not repeat Ayaki’s fate; nor any other event. Word of the Assembly’s intervention between herself and the Anasati had spread to the most remote province of the Nations, and although the cho-ja might not understand all the nuances of human affairs, they held an astute recollection of events.

Perhaps the hive mind sensed that the interdiction of the Assembly lay at the root of Mara’s inquiries; certainly something warned them off. While the Queen customarily sat massive and unmoving, for the first time in Mara’s experience the attendants around her went from frenetic motion to utter stillness. All activity in that vast hall ceased, though no apparent order called for silence.

Mara’s uneasiness coalesced into fear.

The Queen had long ago revealed that cho-ja alliances were sold as commodities. Mara had paid lavish sums for the loyalty of the hives on both her estates. She shivered at the thought that the Great Ones’ influence might extend even here, and that in words or inference she might call down their chastisement. A spell-wrought earthquake even a fraction as violent as the one that had shaken the Holy City when the Black Robe Milamber had unleashed his might would utterly devastate these tunnels. Arches and vaults would crumble into dust, and tons of black earth would fall … Aware how her hands trembled, Mara thrust them into her sleeves. She must not think! Only act. And in truth, the Queen had not spoken to indicate which way hive allegiance might lie.

All that could be done was wait.

The silence became eerie in its intensity. In time, Mara’s hyperextended senses detected a faint buzzing, high-pitched as the beat of insect wings. She wondered whether this sound might signal some sort of wide-ranging communication, then decided it indeed must, since the Queen spoke with the authority of one who had reached a decision. ‘Mara of the Acoma, you made a point which, if I venture to presume, your kind might call wise. You observed that you live in a small world. You would do well to redefine the boundaries of that world, and look to other worlds that coexist with your own.’