The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 4: Friends: Section IV: Dashel

Dashel: Qemassen: The Palace

Kissing Thanos might have distracted Dashel, if it weren't for the wasps.

The Lora ambassador had somehow acquired several boxes of wasps' nests from an Ajwata merchant who'd claimed to have carted them all the way from the mythic lands south of the Sajit. It seemed pointless when Qemassen had its own wasps and no one was running around snatching them out of the air to sell in the Eghri.

The insects didn't stay in the boxes that contained their nests, but buzzed around the palace riad where Dashel and Thanos were sitting on a painted wooden bench, Thanos's lips hot against Dashel's own, Dashel's attention torn between wasp, lover, and where he was going to come up with the remaining coin he'd promised Hesh for that sapenta last week.

It didn't help that Thanos was wearing a very large hat he'd sewn himself and coated in honey. More than a few dead wasps had already stuck to the sides of the hat, which was apparently Thanos's intention. A rogue wasp landed on Thanos's shoulder, far too close to Dashel's own, and he jerked back and bolted from the bench. The sudden movement frightened a flurry of insects from the hat and into the air.

Dashel held his hands up, palms outward. "All right. All right. I'm not a coward, I promise. But this is a lot of wasps. And you're not the only person who lives here—did you ask Djana how she felt about this?"

Thanos glared at him from the bench, unflinching despite the insects that danced around his long, silky black hair. He made a show of examining his nails. "Djana's first in line for one of my wasp hats, actually. And I don't really care how the other ambassadors feel. Do you really think Fadil's going to complain when I wield the might of the Lora empire in one hand—"

"And a sword covered in wasps in the other?" Dashel joked. He grinned, but another wasp hovered in front of his nose and he took a step back, colliding with a potted citron tree. The huge vase wobbled on the tiles. Dashel reached back and steadied it. "I just think," he started to say, watching Thanos's brown doe-eyes for a hint the ambassador could be convinced, "I just think, what if you killed the wasps before you put them on the hat? As a suggestion."

"Then they'd be dead," Thanos answered flatly. He stood up and crossed his arms. "What's the point of paying for a wasp hat made of dead wasps?"

Dashel scratched his head. "Well . . . yes? Exactly?" He shuffled a little to the left, toward the shallow, rectangular pool at the centre of the riad.

"I promised my financiers live wasps, and live wasps they'll have."

"Whether they want them or not," Dashel muttered. Maybe Lorar had sent Thanos here not as a peacekeeping ambassador, but as a secret weapon to destroy the Massenqa from within. With wasps.

Thanos took two steps toward Dashel, but when Dashel flinched, he paused to remove his prototype. He laid the hat on the bench with the reverence of a priest setting an offering upon the altar. "The problem with you Massenqa is that you don't have an eye for innovation—everything's taken from somewhere else: Ajwata scarves here, Anata architecture there. Lorar has a very strong identity, and it's because we envision change instead of copying. Ours is an elegant simplicity, not this—" he gestured at the ambassadorial quarters, the myriad colours of the painted walls, the interlocking patterns on its support columns, the jumble of symbols carved into wood and stone and recreated in the mosaic tiles, "cluttered confusion."

Dashel chose to ignore the fact that Thanos had called him a Massenqen in favour of the much more disturbing claim that Lorar was superior because they considered wearing live insects an elegant simplicity. He shrugged. "Maybe old-fashioned is good sometimes."