But swift and terrible as the young queen might have been, the match was not an even one. Where claws struck the elder Queen, sparks flew from her seemingly soft flesh, turning the attack aside. But where the younger queen was hit, flesh parted, and green-brown blood flew in fine arcs. The vord queens fought a spinning, climbing, leaping duel at a speed too swift to be seen clearly, much less interfered with, and Invidia found herself tracking the motion simply to know when she might need to leap out of the way.
Then the elder Queen made a mistake. She slipped on a slickened spill of the younger queen's blood, and her balance faltered for a fraction of a second. There was not time enough for the young queen to close in for a more deadly blow - but it was more than time enough for her to dart behind the elder Queen and seize the fabric of the dark cloak. With a twisting motion, she wrapped the cloak around the elder Queen's throat and leaned back, pulling with both frail-seeming arms, tightening the twisted fabric like a garrote against her mother's neck.
The elder Queen bent into a sinuous bow, straining against the strangling cloth, her expression quite calm as her dark eyes fell with a palpable weight upon Invidia.
The Aleran woman met her eyes for a pair of endless seconds before she nodded once, rose, lifted her hand, and with an effort of will and furycraft caused the air within the nose, mouth, and lungs of the young queen to congeal into a nearly liquid mass.
The response was immediate. The younger queen twisted and writhed in sudden agony, still holding on desperately to the twisted cloak.
The elder Queen severed it with a slash of her claws, slipped free, turned, and with half a dozen smoothly savage movements tore the younger queen open from throat to belly, removing organs along the way. It was calmly done, the work of an old hand in a slaughterhouse more than the intense uncertainty of a battle.
The young queen's body fell limp to the floor. The elder Queen took no chances. She dismembered it with neat, workmanlike motions. Then she turned, as if nothing at all had happened, and walked back to the table. Her chair remained in its place though the table had been ruined.
The Queen sat down in her chair and stared forward, at nothing.
Invidia walked slowly over to her side, righted her own fallen chair, and sat down in it. Neither of them spoke for a time.
"Are you hurt?" Invidia asked, finally.
The Queen opened her mouth, then did something Invidia had never seen before.
She hesitated.
"My daughter," the Queen said, her voice a near whisper. "The twenty-seventh since returning to Alera's shores."
Invidia frowned. "Twenty-seventh...?"
"Part of our... nature..." The vord shivered. "Within each queen is an imperative to remain separate. Pure. Untainted by our contact with other beings. And to remove any queen that shows signs of corruption. Beginning several years ago, my junior queens have universally attempted to remove me." Her face was touched by a faint frown. "I do not understand. She did no physical harm to me. Yet..."
"She hurt you."
The Queen nodded, very slowly. "I had to remove their capacity to produce more queens lest they gather numbers to remove me. Which has hurt us all. Weakened us. By all rights, this world should have been vord five years ago." Her eyes narrowed, and she turned her faceted gaze upon Invidia. "You acted to protect me."
"You hardly needed it," Invidia said.
"You did not know that."
"True."
The vord Queen tilted her head, studying Invidia intently. She braced herself for the unpleasant intrusion of the Queen's mind - but it did not come.
"Then why?" the Queen asked.
"The younger queen clearly would not have permitted me to live."
"You might have struck at both of us."
Invidia frowned. True enough. The two queens had been so intent upon one another, they would hardly have been able to react to a sudden attack from Invidia. She could have called up fire and obliterated them both.
But she hadn't.
"You could have fled," the Queen said.
Invidia smiled faintly. She gestured to the creature latched upon her chest. "Not far enough."
"No," the vord said. "You have no other place to go."
"I do not," Invidia agreed.
"When something is held in common," the Queen asked, "is it considered a bond?"
Invidia considered her answer for a moment - and not for the benefit of the Queen. "It is often the beginning of one."
The vord looked at her fingers. Their dark-nailed tips were stained with the younger queen's blood. "Do you have children of your own?"
"No."
The Queen nodded. "It is... unpleasant to see them harmed. Any of them. I am pleased that you are not distracted by such a thing at this time." She looked up and squared her shoulders, straightening her spine - mirroring Invidia herself. "What is the proper Aleran etiquette when an assassination interrupts dinner?"
Invidia found a small smile on her mouth. "Perhaps we should repair the furniture."
The vord tilted her head again. "I do not have that knowledge."
"When my mother died, my father apprenticed me to all the finest master artisans of the city for a year at a time. I think mainly to be rid of me." She rose and considered the broken table, the scattered splinters. "Come. This is a more demanding discipline than flying or calling fire. I will show you."
They had just sat back down at the repaired table when the whistling, trilling alarm shrieks of wax spiders filled the air.
The Queen came to her feet at once, her eyes opening very wide. She stood perfectly still for a moment, then hissed, "Intruders. Widespread. Come."
Invidia followed the Queen outside into the moonlit night, onto the gently luminous croach that spread around the enormous hive. The Queen started downslope, pacing swiftly and calmly, as the trilling alarm continued to spread.
Invidia heard angry, high-pitched buzzing sounds unlike anything she had encountered. The creature on her chest reacted to them uneasily, shifting its many limbs and sending anguish pouring through her body in a fire that threatened to rob her of breath. She fought to continue walking in the Queen's shadow without stumbling, and finally had to put her hand to her knife and draw upon a pain-numbing metalcrafting to let her continue.
They came to a broad pool of water that had gathered at the center of a shallow valley. It was no more than a foot deep and perhaps twenty across. The shallow waters teemed with the larval forms of the takers.
Standing upon the waters in the center of the pool was a man.