Weavers by my side.’ This last was delivered in an insultingly sardonic tone. ‘Sometimes it’s best not to let anyone know everything, Kakre. A good ruler realises that. And don’t forget I helped make Blood Batik great long before I met you.’
‘I am your Weave-lord!’ Kakre barked. ‘I need to know everything!’
‘So you can turn it against me? I think not,’ Mos said, his voice quiet and deadly. He was a man who had nothing left to lose, and even the terror of the Weavers had no hold on him now. The Imperial Keep had cast them both in shadow, but Mos’s rage made him seem darker still. ‘I’m no fool. I know what you’re doing. You treat with Koli and Kerestyn to get rid of me.’ His eyes filled with tears of sheer hatred. ‘You should never have let go, Kakre. You should never have stopped the dreams.’ He leaned closer, breathing in the stench of corrupted flesh, showing his enemy that he was not afraid.
‘I know it was you,’ he whispered.
The gaping death-mask of Kakre looked back at him emptily.
‘I can kill you in a moment,’ the Weave-lord said, the words issuing from the cavernous black mouth dripping with venom.
‘But you daren’t,’ Mos said, leaning back and away from him. ‘Because you don’t know who will be Emperor by nightfall now. And you won’t use your cursed mind-bending power on me, because you can’t be sure it will work. You slipped up once, Kakre. You didn’t cover your tracks when you left.’ He was almost shaking with disgust. ‘I remember. I remember your filthy fingers inside my head. The memories came back; you didn’t bury them deep enough.’
He turned away, back to the battle, the tears still standing in his eyes. ‘But I still need you, Kakre. Gods save me, I need the Weavers. Without you, there’s no way to get in touch with Okhamba and the Merchant Consortium fast enough to avert this famine. There’s no way to keep this land together when people begin to starve. It will be chaos, and riots, and slaughter.’ He took a shuddering breath, and the tears spilled at last, twin tracks losing themselves in the bristles of his beard. ‘To expose you, to call the noble houses to rise up and throw you out, would cause the death of millions.’
Kakre’s reaction was unreadable. He faced the Emperor for a long while, but the Emperor would only look at the battle below. Eventually, Kakre turned his attention back that way also.
‘Watch closely, Kakre,’ Mos said through gritted teeth. ‘I still have one trick left to play.’
The noise of the battle was immense, a thuggish, constant bellow underpinned by the boom of artillery and counterpointed by the scrape of steel on steel, the screams of the dead and the dying, the bone-snap reports of rifles. In the killing ground at its centre, men struggled and fought in amidst a crowd of allies and enemies, a world of disorder where every angle could bring a new attack, the survivors owing their continued life to luck as much as skill. Arrows smacked into shoulders and thighs like diving birds plunging after fish. Swords carved through flesh, causing death in ways far more brutal than fiction or history would present. The neat beheadings and swift killing strokes were few; blows glanced, slicing meat from the forearm or hacking halfway through a man’s knee, splitting someone’s face from left cheek to right ear in a spray of shattered bone or chopping into an artery to leave the wounded man bleeding white on the grass of the plains. Flame sprang up in slicks as shellshot burst, burning jelly sticking to skin and cooking it, men flailing and shrieking as their tongues blackened and their eyeballs popped and ran sizzling down their faces. The air was smoke and blood and the sick-sweet smell of charred bodies, and the battle raged on.
‘I need the Bloods Nabichi and Gor back here now!’ Grigi was demanding of his Weaver. His high, girlish voice made him sound panicky, but he was far from that. Grigi was very hard to rattle, and the seemingly inexplicable appearance of eight thousand Blood Batik troops behind them was merely a clever move to be countered. Already he had a force moving up to delay them while he could get his fire-cannons turned around and aimed. It was going to make this fight more costly, but he could still win it with shrewd leadership.
‘That fool Kakre is