Mistress of the Empire (80 page)

Saric fought, hampered by his useless shoulder. Blood ran down his arm and spattered the ground under his feet. His sandals slipped on slicked leaves. He could barely defend himself. Weakness seemed to travel in waves through his sinews. His enemy was grinning, a bad sign. In a moment his efforts would end in grief. Then a soldier called his name.

Saric stretched his lips in joyless recognition. Azawari still lived. As the Acoma Strike Leader raced to the adviser’s relief, and more Minwanabi in false armor converged in a knot to prevent him, Saric managed a brief contact of eyes between strokes.

Each man knew his fate. Each smiled, welcoming the certainty, the final relief that mortal flesh could no longer deny. Saric was struck upon the side. The blow made him stagger, tearing a gasp from his throat. The Acoma Strike Leader faced three more opponents. He was shouting in what seemed defiant rage, but Saric recognised cold purpose behind his insults. ‘Come, Anasati puppets!’ Azawari danced and brandished his sword. ‘You may tell your children you sent Azawari, Strike Leader to the Servant of the Empire, to the Red God’s halls! If you live to have children! If they can admit to fathers who shame them by wearing honored colors not their own. Die for your insolence, Minwanabi dogs!’

But the warriors were not goaded into striking; instead, they measured their distance. The middle one leaped at Azawari, while the others dodged to each side, resuming the chase after Mara. Azawari flung sideways. The warrior
who lunged at him missed his stroke, and the one who ran left screamed as a sword slid between his ribs. The one who dodged right checked his rush, uncertain. Azawari held no such hesitation. He flung himself after, not caring whether a sword whined between. He took a blow to the flank, but brought down the runner in a lunge.

Saric saw the green-plumed helm fall. He blinked back furious tears, aware that the gallant Strike Leader had bought Mara precious seconds, for the last of the treacherous trio had to stop his rush and stab his fallen body twice to ensure his death was certain.

The First Adviser raised his blade; too slow, for his muscles were spent. He missed the stroke. Pain slashed hot across his neck, and the brightness of the world seemed suddenly dull and distant. Saric tottered and fell. The last thing he knew before darkness swallowed his senses was the rich smell of moss and the sound of enemy soldiers leaving the site of bloody victory to pursue one last running form: Mara. Saric struggled to say a prayer for the Good Servant, but words would not come. He had no breath, and no more speech in him, after all. His final thought, as death took him, was of Nacoya, who had trained him. The indomitable harridan would be shrill when he met her in Turakamu’s halls, and found him fallen to a warrior’s honor despite her best efforts to raise him to higher station. More than eager to cross words with his touchy Acoma predecessor, for his mind was far from ready to quit the fight, Saric almost smiled.

Mara ran.

Brush hooked her ankles, and her breath burned her throat. She fought her way forward, gasping. Long past the point where her body needed rest, she knew if she stopped, she was dead. Enemies pursued her relentlessly. As she ducked under branches, she caught glimpses of them: figures in green running after.

There was something profoundly evil in the sight of men wearing her house colors chasing behind with murderous purpose. Mara thrashed through a strand of creeper, driven by more than fear. That green armor had always represented those willing to die for her, willing to protect her at any cost, and enemies wearing Acoma colors brought her to the edge of despair.

How many had died of this last conjoined treachery of Minwanabi and Anasati? Saric and Azawari, two of her finest younger officers, ones she had determined to spare. The soldiers with her had been fit, tough men chosen for their dependability in an emergency. But with their eyes upon the Assembly of Magicians, who among them had guessed that the trap to overtake them so near to their goal would be so mundane, yet so murderous?

The cho-ja tunnels were just a short march distant.

Always a healthy woman, Mara was nevertheless not the girl she had been when she had assumed the Acoma mantle. The wrestling matches and foot races with her brother were thirty years behind her, and her breath tore now from her chest. She could not continue; yet she must.

The soldiers behind were closing on her. Encumbered
by heavier armor, they had marched some distance before the encounter; the race for a time had been even. Now it was not. Mara’s next step became a stumble. Her foemen neared. For torturous minutes, the only sound she acknowledged was the pounding of sandal-clad feet upon the earth and her own labored breathing.

Mara could not speak for breath and for sorrow. There were two at her heels, one just a pace behind, and the other a bare half stride more, and coming hard. Almost she could sense the raised blade at her back. Any instant she expected the shock of the thrust, followed by pain and a spiraling fall into darkness.

To die by the blade was honor, she thought wildly. But she felt only black rage. All in life she had striven for would become wasted because of a warrior’s narrow-minded hatred and revenge. She could do nothing; only punish her body forward in what might be the last step she took. So would a gazen die, nailed in flight by the mailed claws of the sarcat who hunted for meat.

The ground began to rise. Mara threw herself into the grade and tripped. She fell hard. A sword cut the air where her body had been, and a warrior gruffly cursed.

She rolled through dry leaves. Her armor hampered her, and the sword at her side she had not thought to toss away hooked on a root and trapped her.

She looked up to a dizzy impression of greenery and flecks of bright sky. Across these reared an enemy face in a nightmare of friendly colors. Mara saw the sword rise to slash down and take her. She had no breath to cry out, but could only fall back, thrashing, in a futile effort to escape.

The warrior who raced one pace behind reached the scene at that instant. His blade rose and fell a bit faster, by a fraction; and the flesh he hewed down was the enemy’s.

Sobbing in exhausted reaction, Mara did not realise until after the dying man slammed in a heap across her legs that not all green armor held traitors. One familiar face had survived, bleeding from a cut cheek. ‘Xanomu,’ she cried. ‘Bless the gods.’

He heaved off the corpse, jerked her up, and shoved her stumbling away from him. ‘Go, mistress,’ he gasped out. His voice was cramped by pain, due to worse wounds in his body. ‘Find the cho-ja. I will delay your enemies.’

Mara wanted to praise him, to let him know her gratitude for his valor. She could not catch her wind.

Xanomu saw her struggle. ‘My Lady, go! There are more coming, and only I to hold them.’

Mara whirled, tears half blinding her. Xanomu’s dream of seeing her safe to the cho-ja was false hope: the insectoids would not fight. They were bound by the Assembly’s treaty, and surely by now they knew of her defiance of the Great Ones’ edict.

She ran anyway. The alternative was to be butchered where she stood, as two hulking warriors smashed out of the undergrowth and sprang, with only Xanomu’s failing strength to delay them.

The struggle was brief, barely a half-dozen sword strokes before the gurgling moan of a man cut through the neck. Xanomu had fallen, his life sold to gain his mistress a few more yards through the forest. The trees were thinning, Mara thought; or maybe her eyesight had begun to fail, dazzled by the beginnings of a faint.

She blinked away tears or maybe sweat, and darkness rose up like a black wall to swallow her.

She flung out a hand, as if to break a fall, and her fingernails scraped across chitin.

Cho-ja! She had reached the mound. Black bodies closed in on her, pressing her upright on all sides. Mara gasped, panting, a helpless prisoner. These were not warriors but
workers, a tight-knit band of foragers who seemed to be headed back to their hive.

She knew better than to believe she was safe. Between gasps, she said, ‘You … are bound to obey … the Assembly’s … edict! You must … not fight!’

The cho-ja ignored her. They could not do battle in any event, being workers unspecialised for combat. No weapons or tools were carried among them. But as they knotted tighter around Mara, and her pursuers sprinted out of the trees, she realised: the insectoids could not fight, but only die.

The lead warrior screamed to his companions, and in a rush, they charged. Swords flashed in late-day sunlight as they hewed down a worker marching in procession with its fellows.

It fell without sound, kicking and rolling in its pain. As if only now cognisant of their threat, the workers left living clashed together into a single body, with Mara wedged at their center. She was pressed too close to fall to the ground; neither could she shove her way against the current as the insectoids simultaneously thrust forward in a teeth-rattling sprint. Like flotsam caught in a current, she was carried along. She could not see for the dust and the clack of chitin-covered bodies. Turf ripped at her feet. She lost a sandal. Then the mound of the hive rose up, suddenly, and they descended into darkness.

The Minwanabi in false armor shouted and raced after them into the tunnel.

Mara gave up the distraction of thought. Borne along with the workers, and blind in a morass of unfamiliar smells and sounds, she made no effort to analyse. Her eyes adjusted slowly, and she twisted her head to make sense of the commotion and clamoring behind her. For a long moment she did not identify the strange, scraping rattle of blades striking unprotected chitin.

Cho-ja bodies littered the tunnel floor, and still the false warriors came on. The cho-ja about Mara slackened pace with a jerk, and a high-pitched buzzing stung her ears.

The next instant, a dark tide eclipsed the last light from the entrance. She knew that cho-ja workers were inserting themselves in the path of flight and that the pursuing soldiers could do nothing to reach her unless they hacked themselves a path though living bodies.

Mara felt too pummeled with weariness to weep for grief or relief. Her mind was punished with the recognition that, even though this hive was under attack, its warrior defenders dared not risk a response for fear that the Assembly might charge its denizens with breaking the treaty. Although she knew that the cho-ja counted individual lives – workers in particular – as expendable at need, she knew regret that any such life should be sacrificed to save her.

The last faint daylight vanished, as the cho-ja rounded a corner. Mara was conducted in total darkness. Aware as she was since her trip to Chakaha in Thuril that cho-ja were by nature day creatures, she perceived strategy in the lack of illumination. Her escorting party of workers was leading her ever deeper into the hive, past countless twistings and turnings of the way. The Minwanabi were being lured into following. Doom awaited them. They would never come alive out of this maze. The cho-ja need not trouble themselves with killing. Humans who lost themselves in the tunnels beneath the earth would wander until they perished, wasted from thirst and hunger.

‘Convey my thanks to your Queen,’ Mara murmured.

The worker cho-ja deigned not to reply. It might have been the treaty that held them silent, or it might have been sorrow for their fallen fellows. Mara felt the touch of their bodies against her, no longer crushing, but as tender as if she were cradled within a giant fist. It occurred to her belatedly
that she had been caught up to the point of blindness by her personal concern for Justin. These cho-ja were doing her no favor but perhaps in their way lending her aid for the sake of their own cause, since she had brought back cho-ja mages for the purpose of defeating the Assembly.

These beings saw their freedom in her survival.

Mara realised that the slavelike workers might be forbidden to communicate. But the possibility existed that their Queen was not acting from strict neutrality but, in her covert way, as an ally to Mara’s human cause.

The workers were going somewhere quickly. They showed no sign of spacing their bodies apart to let her fall by the wayside. What if they had been sent on an ‘errand’ that by design was meant to coincide with the direction she desired to go? Or worse, what if they went mindlessly on about their hive’s purpose, and she was carried in a direction she did not care to go? Time, above all, was of the essence. Her children’s survival depended upon swift action.

Mara gulped a breath. Her legs were spent. Even had she wanted to, she could not achieve so much as one step unassisted. Neither could she stay safely wedged between the carapaces of a dozen fast-moving bodies whose destination was unknown.

If she dared to presume, she might ask to ride.

The effrontery of that supposition might get her killed – should she slip while trying to climb on a moving cho-ja, encumbered as she was by her armor, the cho-ja continuing to ignore her as they trampled her fallen body.

Worker cho-ja had no appreciation of the Tsurani concept of dignity. Still, Mara could not bring herself to think of them as mere beasts of burden, and that bias, along with her recovering strength, kept her silent. She recalled Lujan’s expression on that long-past day in Dustari when the slave Kevin had made the preposterous suggestion that had led her armies to victory on the backs of cho-ja warriors.

Tears flooded her eyes at the memory. Lujan had looked pale and sick as he stared at the broad, black body he was expected to mount. Yet he had done so, and gone on to win a great war.

Who was she, to risk such as he on the Plain of Nashika, and yet not dare the same heights?

Her heart faltered at the prospect. Yet she was lost if she did not find a way to unite the cho-ja in rebellion against their oppressors, and rejoin the Chakaha mages who waited in hiding in burrows back at her estates; her son and daughter would be dead, at the hand of the first rival claimant to the golden throne. If the pretender was not to be Jiro, there would be others equally merciless.

And the Assembly of Magicians would never while she breathed forgive her slight to their omnipotence.

There remained her last card left to play, the final desperate plan she had outlined during her last council before war had broken out. For that, she must reach the Queen of this hive and be received for audience.

She did not feel bold, and had to force courage. Her voice sounded shaky, when at last she summoned nerve to try speech. ‘Take me to your Queen,’ she requested.

The workers did not respond. ‘I must have words with your ruler,’ Mara insisted louder.

The workers did not answer, but they stopped. The sudden jolt into stillness all but spilled Mara from her feet. ‘I have to see your Queen,’ she cried, shouting now, and raising a storm of echoes.

Light bloomed down a side corridor. Mara turned that way and, over the humped carapaces of the worker party, saw an approaching band of warriors. These were Tsurani-bred cho-ja, helmed as men would be, with a Strike Leader wearing plumes at the fore. He reached the juncture of the tunnels and turned eyes like onyx upon the disheveled woman amid the workers. ‘I am Tax’ka. I have
come to grant your request and conduct you to this hive’s Queen.’

Mara forgot weariness in a great wash of relief. As the workers parted to clear her way, she stepped forward, and came as near as a breath to howling frustration as her fickle knees gave way.

The cho-ja Strike Leader knelt. ‘You may ride,’ it intoned. ‘Our Queen is not minded to wait upon your weariness.’

Mara was too tired to bridle at a remark that from a human would have been taken for insult. She struggled back to her feet and accepted a worker’s assistance to help her mount on the Strike Leader’s midsection. She settled astride, insecure upon the black and slippery carapace. Her sweating hands found no grip that seemed trustworthy, and the cho-ja in its silence seemed unwilling to spare concern for her human discomfort.

‘Go,’ she said, resolved. ‘Take me to your Queen with all haste.’

The cho-ja’s stride as it surged forward was startling for its smoothness. Mara clung without further worry, leaning forward, so that she might grip tight to the warrior’s chitinous neck. She had no clue how far the cavern of the Queen might lie from this outlying tunnel. Some hives were so vast she could be riding cho-ja back for hours to cross them. The spice-scented air of the tunnel fanned her face. Her sweat dried, and her breathing returned to normal.