90 - The Bees Reacted

The annual spring storms that poured down on Lainz, combined with the thunderous snowmelt as it had for aeons and originally carved the canyon, had come and gone. Now the sun, the blinding radiance above in a sky so harsh a blue/purple one could imagine hammering nails into it.

The water retreated from the blue-hot iron of the sun, creeping away from the stone and down the walls of the Basin, leaving the little boats people lived in, dry on their stilts and ladders, dry on the dust that blew in from the white desert. Every year people jostled for a better position when their homes grounded.

Moisture sank into the cracks and crevices and then evaporated completely, leaving only the condensation snow that lived all year in the bottom of the canyon, and the stubborn, shrinking river trailing along the stone, far below the walls it had scoured only weeks ago.

The flowers, finished with their eye-blink life, grew brown and blew away, leaving their parent plants hiding precious seeds and fluids behind thick brown bark, or inside gray/green fleshy barrels coated with their own ghostly wax, or died back to the rim of the ground, tucking their lives back into the thread-thin roots in bad soil, waiting for the water to come back.

In the shaded fields, and ‘cliner-cut terraces up and down the cliff face, the Lainz crops grew, each plant carefully tended, lovingly watered, by hand or by water bought, drop by drop, from the pump-head, raised from the river below.

Just after sunset, before the deep cold of night, the stop-cocks were turned with creaks and groans by diligent field workers, the mist-waterers whispering to life, so that every drop was available for the sun-warmed plants, but none wasted to the thirsty, heat-shimmering air.

It was the Deep Dry. Hottest, brightest, most brutal time of year, when everyone lay under the Radiance. Everyone was forced flat, hammered onto their faces by the heat. This was when even the bees of Lainz worked at night, and worked far below, where both water and night-blooming flowers could be found.

Under the Emperor Hive the screens didn’t block the wind, the breeze blowing through the carved stone flowers. The Hive sisters were spread thin over the inside of the hall roof, the beat of their wings adding to the cooling breeze. Water pumped up to the reservoir just under the Sun Crystal drifted down in a fine mist outside the windows and cool the hot wind blowing in, chilling it.

The court wore the thinnest of silk veils and the lightest of Trovian cottons rather than their more traditional gauze linens. Diryish stood before his chair as the court parted for the older woman dressed in white and blue with a red-gold veil and silver eyelid paint. “Mother. You are most welcome. These old eyes are so eased by your beauty, we are disappointed that we cannot more often lure you from your Zar School.”

She sank in a stately curtsy, small golden feather shaped weights chiming on the marble from the edge of her third veil. “Immutable. You are too kind. And I should remind you that I am hardly your ‘Mother’!” The smile was easy in her voice.

He answered it with white teeth still showing a flash behind his veil. “Yes, and certainly not my sister! Thriti, please come and sit with me.” He held out his hands to her, the tips of his fingers gilded.

“I may not stay long, Immutable. I am called to my poor, disgraced daughter, but I did have to make my submission to you personally.”

“Ah. She has called you? Shashi.” He settled down to his throne, handing Thriti into the courtesy stool at his knee. He waved Nasera Basserus out of the crowd with the hand he’d seated Mother with. “Nasera. You have my leave to attend to Mariush with Mother Thriti, when I release her. Mother informs me her time to give birth to her little bastard.” My apologies, my dear. “I do not wish to see it.” I do. I do wish to see this last child of mine before I die. I want to hold the living flesh engendered by me on your beautiful mother.

“Of course, Radiance.” She curtsied as best she could with the bulk of her own pregnancy slowing her down and moved to stand behind Mother, her own black fan adding to the stir of air.

“Ah, Mother Thriti. Have something to drink before you go. The woman will be labouring for hours yet.”

“Yes, your Brightness,” she fanned herself idly with a honeywood fan. The women ranked themselves off to her side of the room, their veils the colour of flowers. Diryish leaned back against the Hive throne, cut from citrine, the hand-rests carved like the hilts of swords sunk in the stone. 

“She’s fine, Thriti,” he murmured in the hair’s breadth of time he had before the vizier clapped a young servant forward with his tray of iced drinks.

“Oh, His Radiance is teasing me!” Mother fanned herself and answered, out loud, a comment he hadn’t made. Sashi waited by her shoulder and as the young man knelt gracefully before Mother, something tweaked her sense of warning. Something was not right.

The servant rose from his elegant service to Mother and turned toward Diryish, who watched him with lazy, half-lidded eyes. A number of things happened at the same time.

A servant raised a tray, puffed through a straw.

Thriti's fan snapped out to catch the dart in its folds.

The Emperor leaned out of the line of fire, seized one of the hilts in his throne.

The Rasheem began to move to protect His Radiance.

The bees reacted, their drowsy hum ratchetting up to an alarmed roar.

And things began to unravel, unfold, unwrap all at once. The Emperor was on his feet the sword pulling out of the throne with a ‘shrinnggg’ as he stepped toward the assassin.

The assassin flung the tray, crossed his hands and drew knives. The Emperor bent back, avoiding, as the woman’s fan reached out and tapped the tray up to arc over his Radiance’s ducking head. The spinning metal raised a fan of sparks off a column behind the throne with an awful screeching sound before clattering ineffectually to the floor.

Diryish came up from his odd position, brought his sword up and around cutting hard at the man's knee. The assassin leapt over the cut, the tip of the manifest sword slicing through skin, drawing blood after it.

The assassin landed hard on the floor, came up to face His Radiance and the bees came.