In the hive on the Emperor’s
balcony the hive hummed. The bees sang to themselves and danced and drowsily
fanned their wings to keep the hive warm and humid in the frigid desert night,
black and yellow topaz bodies glimmering as they moved gently in the moonlight
shining into the nest, turning its cold silver light golden, caught in memories
of sun and flowers.
A drone on the outer lip of the
hive, still as every cold bee, shifted in the chill wind on the one side of its
body, prism eyes small rainbows as it moved, clicking one leg up over its head to
clear and clean the eye on one side, then the other. Its crystal clear wings
quivered once, twice.
In the Emperor’s bedroom, the
mal-spider sank down and then sprang as if the metal legs were sprung wire and
landed with a thump on the silken rug under the dressing table. It glittered
forward smoothly as if on wheels, emerald eye-cluster aimed at the Emperor’s
trailing bedclothes, venom glistening greasily in stinger and fangs.
As the spider hit the floor, the
quiet hum of the hive rose to a disturbed roar. The single drone, moving where
it would normally have been still, jumped into flight, wings quivering as it
zipped into the air. Hundreds of its fellows followed, clicking and whirring.
Zooming in through the opening from the balcony, they circled the Emperor’s
rooms, rainbow eyes pulling in information, light and shadow, glass wings whirring.
The spider crouched in the shadow
where it had frozen at the first sound of the bees, pressed tight to an ornate
table leg, head tilting as it tracked first one, then ten, then struggled to
follow a hundred bees in flight. A dozen bees settled into the silken curtains
around the Emperor, who stirred, rolled over again, his sleep disturbed but not
yet broken.
The hive’s hum rumbled, a low,
boiling sound. The spider crawled on its glass-furred belly up the table leg on
the inside, in the deep shadow.
For a time everything grew still again, save
for Diryish’s occasional snore, the hive slowly settling, the mal-spider
crouching still as a non-living thing underneath the table top, wedged into the
joint where the table-leg was cross-braced, glittering faintly in the dark. The
drones and workers all through the bedchambers settled and grew still in
cornices and curtains and on the edges of unlit stone sconces.
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