Mistress of the Empire (62 page)

The magician turned on its stilt-like legs. Its now heated gaze swept the stilled tribunal, and as it turned full
around, it glared again down at Mara. ‘You are a curious being,’ it said.

Mara bowed, though her knees threatened to give out on her. ‘Yes, Great One.’

The cho-ja magician hissed a high-pitched breath of air. ‘Assign me not the title your kind awards to those perpetrators of treachery, your Assembly.’

‘Lord, then,’ Mara rang back. ‘I offer my humble respect, for the oppression of the Assembly has been mine to suffer also.’

A twitter from those assembled arose at this, then stilled. The magician’s glare seemed to sear through Mara’s skin and touch the core of her thoughts. Swept by a sense of violation, and a moment that rang like fever, or the pain of contact with flame, she cringed and choked back a scream. Then the sensation passed, leaving dizziness. She fought to keep her balance and stay upright.

When her senses cleared, the cho-ja magician was speaking rapidly to the tribunal. ‘She speaks truth.’ Its tone had turned musical, perhaps resulting from surprise. ‘This Tsurani has no knowledge of the doings of her ancestors! How can this be?’

Mara mustered the tatters of her dignity and answered for herself. ‘Because my kind have no hive mind, no collective memory. We know only that which we experience, or are taught by others, within the span of the days of our lives. Libraries preserve our past history, and these are mere records, subject to the ravages of time, and the limitations set upon them by those factions who set down their contents. Our memories are imperfect. We have no …’ Then she intoned the click-chuck that the Queen on her land had used to indicate the hive consciousness.

‘Silence, Tsurani!’ The magician furled its great wings, with a sigh of air currents and a sparkle of light that arose from no visible source. ‘We are not children. Humans have
no hive mind, this we know. The concept is awkward, a thing that ill fits our thought processes. We understand you use libraries and teachers to convey your hive-nations’ wisdom through the generations.’

Mara seized upon what appeared to be a moment of neutrality. ‘One of your kind once told me that the hive mind of the cho-ja resides with the Queens. What one Queen knows, all experience. But I ask, what happens if a Queen is to die with no successor? What becomes of her workers and her males, and all the individuals that make up hive society?’

The magician clicked its mandibles. ‘Her subjects have no mind,’ it allowed. ‘Should mishap kill a Queen, her rirari, those of her chosen breeding attendants, will behead her survivors out of mercy, for, mindless, they would rove aimlessly and die.’ It stated this without guilt, the concept of murder being different than that for a human.

‘Then,’ Mara surmised boldly, ‘they would not forage for food, or sustain themselves to survive?’

‘They could not.’ Metal flashed as the magician made a curt gesture with its forelimb. ‘They have no purpose beyond the hive. I am no different. The Queen who bred me is all of my guiding directive. I am her eyes, her hands, if you will, and her ears. I am her instrument, even as this tribunal is her arm of judgment. Part of me is conscious, and I may act in independence if it is of benefit to the hive, but all that I am, all that I know, will remain with the hive when this body no longer functions.’

‘Well, I offer that we humans are not like cho-ja subjects. Even as do your Queens, we each have our own mind, our own purpose, our own directive for survival. Kill our rulers and Lords, and we will each go on with our affairs. Leave but one child alive, or one man, and he will live out his days according to his own wishes.’

The cho-ja magician seemed bemused. ‘We have thought
for generations that the Tsurani hive is insane; if it must answer to teeming millions of minds, we know why!’

‘That is individuality,’ Mara said. ‘I have little of importance to offer the Tsurani nation, as one person. Instead, I repeat my request to know the actions of the ancestors that have caused your tribunal to condemn me without hearing.’

The scribe-like creature at the magician’s side peered at Mara and for the first time spoke. ‘The telling might take until nightfall, which is all of the time you are allotted.’

‘So it must be,’ Mara said, steadier now that she had been able at least to open conversation with these alien cho-ja. Of more immediate concern were the bodily needs that had been denied, and how much longer she must be forced to put them off.

But the cho-ja, after all, were not entirely insensitive. The magician’s scribe spoke again. ‘Your will shall be granted, along with whatever comforts you may require to keep your ease through the hour of sundown.’

Mara inclined her head in thanks, and then bowed. When she arose, the magician cho-ja had departed, without sound, without ceremony, as if it had melted away into air. The scribe-type cho-ja remained, directing a sudden influx of unmarked workers who were dispatched to attend Mara’s needs.

Later, refreshed and fed from a lavish tray of fruits, breads, and cheeses, Mara reclined on fine cushions while, still before the tribunal, she was given the services of a cho-ja orator whose task was to fill in for her those gaps in Empire history that were forbidden within the borders of the Nations.

Relieved of discomforts, Mara waved for the cho-ja orator to begin recitation. While the afternoon spilled purple shadows through the pillared windows, and the sky above the crystal dome deepened toward sundown,
she shared a tale of great sorrow, of hives burned by hideous, crackling bolts of magic, and thousands upon thousands of cho-ja subjects mercilessly beheaded by the rirari of slaughtered Queens. She heard tell of atrocities, of eggs stolen, and cho-ja magicians put to useless torture.

Cho-ja in those times had been ill prepared for the realities of an arcanely waged war. They had magic with which to build marvels, magic to adorn nature with the beauty of intelligent artifice, and magic to bring fortune and favorable weather. In such peaceful arts, the insectoid mages held the accumulated wisdom of centuries, and the oldest among them had carapaces whorled and stippled with the patterns of a million spells.

Here Mara dared an interruption. ‘Do you mean that the markings on your mages are badges of experience?’

The orator bobbed its head. ‘Indeed, Lady. Over time they become so. Each spell that they master becomes inscribed in colors upon their bodies, and the greater their powers, the more complex are their markings.’

The orator went on to emphasise that the cho-ja mages from the era of the Golden Bridge held no spells for warlike violence. They could cast beneficial wards to protect, but these were no match for the aggressive magic of the Assembly. The wars involving magic were not battles but massacres. The treaty that bound the cho-ja of the Nations to subservience had been submitted and sworn into being entirely out of need to survive.

‘The terms are harsh,’ the orator finished on a note that might have been sorrow. ‘No mages are to be hatched within Tsuranuanni. Cho-ja there are forbidden to wear the markings that show age or rank, but must be colored black in adult life, even as your Tsurani slaves who are human are restricted to garments of grey. Commerce with cho-ja outside your borders is not allowed, exchange of information, news, or magical lore being specifically
forbidden. It is our suspicion, if not the sad truth, that the Queens within your nations have been forced to excise from hive memory all record and means of cho-ja magic. Were you Tsurani all to perish, and the Assembly’s edict become obsolete, it is doubtful if an Empire-bred Queen could still create the egg to hatch out a mage. And so the sky-cities of our kind are forgotten, reduced by human decree to damp warrens beneath the earth. Our proud brethren are forced to become grubbers in soil, with their arts of spell-building forever lost.’

By now the sky beyond the arch had darkened under twilight. The tribunal, who had heretofore sat in perfect stillness, arose, while the orator in obedience to some unspoken signal fell silent. A cho-ja sentinel at Mara’s back prodded her up from her cushions, and the magician’s scribe tilted its head her way in a manner that suggested regret. ‘Lady, your time of last testament is now ended, and the moment for your sentencing is come. If you have any last bequest, you are urged to state it now.’

‘Last bequest?’ Wine and sweet fruit had dulled the edges of Mara’s apprehension, and the familiarity shared with the orator throughout the afternoon made her bold. ‘What do you mean by this?’

The magician’s scribe shifted its weight and became implacably still. The tallest of the tribunal cho-ja delivered her answer. ‘Your sentence, Lady Mara of Tsuranuanni. After your last testament is given, it will be formally read that you are to be executed at tomorrow’s dawn.’

‘Executed!’ A jolt of adrenaline and fear caused Mara to square her shoulders, and ire lit her eyes. She abandoned protocol. ‘What are your kind, if not barbarians, to condemn an envoy unheard?’ The tribunal members twitched, and the sentinel cho-ja angled forward aggressively, but Mara was already frightened witless and she did not take any note. ‘It was a Queen of your own kind who sent me
here to treat with you. She held hope for those cho-ja who are a captive nation within our Empire’s borders, and she saw in me the chance to rectify the human misdeeds of the past. Would you execute me out of hand, when I am the opponent of the Assembly, come here to ask aid against their tyranny?’

The tribunal regarded her with identical sets of gem-hard eyes, unmoved. ‘Lady,’ rang their spokesman, ‘state your last bequest if you have one.’

Mara closed her eyes. Were all of her efforts to end here, with her life? Had she been Servant of the Empire, wife to a fine Lord, Ruling Lady of the Acoma, and adviser to the Emperor only to die in shame on foreign soil? She repressed a violent shiver, and stayed the hands that itched to scrub the sweat of outright terror from her brow. She had nothing left to her at this moment beyond the dignity of her people. Her honor she no longer believed in, after hearing of what her forebears had done on the battlefield against a peaceful civilisation. And so her voice rang oddly steady as she said, ‘Here is my last bequest: that you take this,’ She held up the magical token given her by Gittania, which should have been her testimony to these hostile aliens. She forced herself to press on. ‘That you take this record, and incorporate it into your hive memory along with the details of my “execution”, so that all of your kind to come will recall that humankind are not alone in the perpetration of atrocity. If my husband and my children – indeed, if my family that serves as my hive must lose me in retribution for the treaty of the Assembly, then at least my heart’s intentions must survive in the hive mind of my killers.’

A buzz of noise met her statement. Mara yielded to reckless, icy resolve. ‘This is my last bequest! Honor it as my death wish, or may the gods curse your kind unto the ending of time for perpetrating the very injustices you deplore in us!’

‘Silence!’ The command rocked the chamber, reverberating off the crystal dome with force enough to deafen. Cringing from the sheer volume of the sound, Mara took a second to realise that the command did not arise from the tribunal but came instead from a cho-ja magician that had materialised out of nowhere at the chamber’s center. Its wings were deployed to full extension, and its markings were complex enough to lose the eye in dizziness. It stalked toward Mara, hard turquoise eyes like the ice that sheathed the distant mountains. When it halted before the Lady, its stance was menacing.

‘Give me your token,’ it demanded.

Mara offered the object, certain she could not have done otherwise even had she been of a mind to resist. There was magecraft in the cho-ja’s tone that compelled response from her flesh.

The cho-ja mage scooped up the token with a touch that barely grazed her skin. Ready with an appeal she had no chance to deliver, Mara was startled by a blinding flash. Light enveloped her, densely implacable as suffocation, and when her senses recovered from the shock of spell-craft, the domed chamber of the tribunal was gone, swept away as though it had never been. She found herself returned to the hexagonal cell, windowless and doorless as before, but now the stone floor was scattered with colored cushions and a pair of Tsurani-style sleeping mats. On the nearest of these crouched Lujan, his head resting in his hands, and his mien one of total despair.

At his Lady’s arrival he started to his feet and gave a warrior’s obeisance. His bearing might be correct to the last detail, but hopelessness lingered still in his eyes.

‘You have heard what is to become of us?’ he asked of Mara. There was a whipsnap of fury in his tone.

The Lady sighed, too discouraged to speak, and unwilling
to believe that she had come all this distance to be summarily consigned to an unjust fate.

‘Did they ask your last bequest before they read your sentence?’ Lujan asked Mara.

Numbly she nodded; and between hopelessness and grief, she thought of one small detail that offered comfort: the cho-ja of Chakaha had not read her sentence. Somehow the token and the disruption caused by the reappearance of the cho-ja mage had interrupted the formal proceedings.

Unwilling to read hope into that small anomaly, Mara made conversation. ‘What did you ask for, as your last bequest?’

Lujan gave back an ironic smile. As if nothing were wrong, he offered his hand and helped Mara down to a more comfortable seat amid the cushions. ‘I did not ask,’ he allowed. ‘I demanded. As is a warrior’s right when condemned by the state for crimes committed by his master, I claimed death by single combat.’