‘Left for where?’ Gaved challenged. ‘She’s already on the brink – the very shore – of her world. Where does she know to go to?’
‘And the great hunter will look after her, will he? Bit of a career reversal, isn’t it?’ Thalric asked him.
Gaved’s look was humourless. ‘I will do this job because I promised Master Maker I would. After that, Rekef, I’m gone, and if I take her with me, is it any business of yours?’
Gaved had worked in and around Jerez long enough to learn how to row, and now he powered the little boat forward with heavy strokes, staring fixedly at the receding shore beyond Tisamon and Tynisa, his passengers.
Sef he had entrusted to Nivit’s care. He did not want to even think of that but, of course, rowing freed the mind wonderfully for random thought. Nivit and I, we go back years. Nivit was primarily a businessman, though, and Gaved was being sentimental. We should sell her back to the lake-creatures and be done with it.
He liked to think that, in his line of work, the people he hunted down were criminals, the wicked and the reckless, on the run from justice. Even when he knew that they were merely escaped slaves or fugitives from the torturing hands of the Rekef, he still liked to think that. He liked to feel he was in the right.
Thalric, an uncomfortable presence in the boat’s bows at Gaved’s back, would see ‘right’ as identical to being in the Empire’s interest, or at least would have done so before his fall from grace. Gaved, however, had never quite been able to coax himself into that point of view, and that was why he had spent his life working twice as hard as any imperial soldier just to put a distance between himself and the Emperor.
But I always came back, he reflected. It was hard for a Wasp to make a living alone. Somehow he had always found that the contracts he undertook bore the imperial seal somewhere upon them.
At least Sef was no concern of the Empire. And I will not sell her to the lake-Beetles, and I must hope that Nivit is not tempted to do it. I must hope that our long friendship buys me that indulgence. He had even ceded Nivit all of the gold Stenwold had paid. Iam a fool in so many ways.
Thalric stared out across the misty lake, seeing the occasional flurry as one of the locals skimmed across its surface on some private business. The dark seemed to bring them out in numbers, but then they were creatures best suited to shady business – and so was Scyla. She had always preferred to deal under cover of darkness, preferring to hide even her changeable features.
He wondered if she could even recall what she truly looked like. Did she have to reassemble her own true face in the mirror first thing every morning, and did it then drift, from day to day?
We shall have a reckoning, you and I, he decided. He had nothing personal against Scyla but such a reckoning looked very likely, and it should be himself, Thalric, who dealt with her. He, who had once run her as an agent of the Wasp Empire, should be the one to bring her down.
The great raft was looming up and he saw several boats there already, with Skater-kinden men standing ready to take the painter line. He put a hand on Gaved’s shoulder to halt his rowing, and the little craft coasted the remaining feet until two Skaters captured its prow with their long arms and tied it up. He put a few coins into their hands, good Helleron Centrals that the Skaters preferred to imperial currency. With that evidence of his prosperity from Stenwold’s diminishing bounty, no further questions would be asked of him. It was exactly as he had hoped. Scyla had chosen this place for its advantages, but she must live with its drawbacks too.
He stepped onto the raft, with only a flick of his wings to keep his balance, feeling the twinge of pain in his side still from where Daklan had stabbed him outside Collegium. He normally prided himself on healing quickly, but just now he was glad to have been able to heal at all.
Scyla had miscalculated, of course, in her lust for secrecy. She thought she had her buyers where she wanted them. She believed herself safe from intrusion out here on the lake, far from any shore.
Thalric smiled a little at that thought. He did not know how well Spider-kinden could swim but he knew that they could not fly. Let her squirm how she liked, there would be no swift escape for Scyla this time.
The others were joining him cautiously on the raft, looking not like a rich buyer’s retinue but more like nervous thieves. Tynisa was pressing at her hand, and he saw that the narrow wound there had opened up yet again.
To Lieutenant Brodan, it seemed clear that the murky waters of the lake were a metaphor for where his career was going. I must be mad, to be out here with this wretched woman. Certainly my men all think I’m mad. He could see it in their faces. They had followed him out here, in the rain and cold, but they were heartily regretting it. They had been kicking their heels amongst the reeds for two hours now, waiting in the dark. Occasionally a Skater would spot them as it padded across the choppy waters, and Brodan was sure they would all be laughing at the skulking Wasp-kinden.
It’s just like the last time. He remembered many fruitless nights spent on or by this lake, trying to intercept contraband that seemed to be able to turn invisible at will. Pillaged loot from the Commonweal had been flooding through Jerez: whole libraries of books, armouries of mail and weapons, treasure beyond counting, yet Brodan’s investigators had found such a tiny fragment of it that he suspected the Skaters had given it up out of pity.
And there she was, the source of all his problems. The wretched old creature was perched on a hummock and staring out at the water. She seemed to be whispering to herself and he wondered if she was actually mad, this whole business her private lunacy. That would explain a great deal.
‘I am losing patience,’ Brodan said through gritted teeth. ‘There is nothing for us in this.’
‘Losing patience? Were you ever gifted with that?’ Sykore said sharply, and Brodan unsheathed his sword in automatic response. She turned her head to stare at him, baring her pointed teeth in a hideous grin. ‘Oh, perhaps one day, Captain, but not on this night. You need me this night.’ Her red eyes fixed him to the spot. ‘They are out there now, as is the box – that and your renegade Thalric, and his Lowlander friends, all together.’
Brodan looked back at his carefully picked handful of men, all of them crouching alongside him in the reeds by the lakeside. They were his strongest fliers, able to make the distance between here and the raft while keeping their strength for the fight. ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ he demanded. ‘If there is any chance you know what you’re talking about, then we should go right now. We take the box, we leave. And meanwhile we kill anyone who looks at us funny.’
‘And which is the holder of the box? You cannot tell and, while you decide, she will shift and change and lose you,’ Sykore told him flatly. ‘No, you have no chance until the box is revealed. I shall know immediately, and then you shall go and take it. Not until then, or it shall be lost in the mist. I am afraid, Captain, that you must swallow your impatience and wait.’
‘You go too far,’ he murmured, but he knew he would not follow up the implied threat.
Sykore glanced back to the lake, baring her teeth in a derisive smile. She had seen into his mind, seen how desperate he was to bring back the box, not for any great purpose but for fear of failure. Like so many of these Wasp-kinden, Brodan lived a life entirely dictated by fear – fear of his superiors’ wrath, his peers’ plots and his inferiors’ ambitions. If only the conquered could see their conquerors as I have, they would rise up in revolt tomorrow, she thought. And they would die for it. Fear is the greatest motivator, fear can make a man fearless, so long as you make him fear you more than he fears any other.
Sykore settled back, heedless of the cold and damp, waiting for that magical moment when the Spider-kinden magician would produce the box out into the chill air, whereupon she would send Brodan and his people across the waters.
‘They’re coming.’
Nivit froze midway through checking an account, watching Sef’s head come up and scent the air like an animal. Something gu
ilty twitched inside him. He had just been thinking about the lake-people and their promised bounty.
‘They ain’t coming,’ he said dismissively.
‘They are,’ she whispered. ‘I can smell them.’
Nivit snorted. ‘Oh, right, what do these water-Beetles smell like, then? Other than rotting reeds and lakewater?’
‘They smell of the poisons they use in order to work their machines.’
Nivit stared at her. ‘Girl, that almost made some sense,’ he said, and put the tablet down to approach the door.
‘I can smell them,’ her hollow voice continued, like dead leaves, ‘as they can scent me and, though I have done all my kinden know to hide myself, yet they have found me at last…’
Now that she had mentioned it there was indeed the faintest whiff of something bitter and oily on the air, and Nivit tried to remember whether he had smelled the same when those lake-people actually had come to his door.
‘You… you stay away from the door, why don’t you,’ he ordered, and Sef obediently retreated away into the darkest recesses of his hut. Obediently, that was the key, and what made her story ring even a little true. She did exactly what she was told, like no Spider ever did, even a Spider that had been enslaved. This could be easier than I might hope for.
He went sideways from the door over to one of his spyholes, peering out into the darkened street outside. Girl’s probably imagining the whole thing.
Even as the thought came to him, he spotted a little pacing shadow, a long-legged, hunch-backed figure a little like a Skater, yet not to be confused with them. He jumped to another spyhole and found himself looking at a broad-shouldered form whose outline showed the armour plainly. Two other large figures were waiting in the shadows nearby.
What had she called the man – Saltwheel? A good Beetle name, but these lake-dwellers were not good Beetles. Now Saltwheel, or whoever, was coming over.
Coming about the bounty. Got the money on him, like as not.
Nivit glanced back at the Spider girl, grimacing. Gaved was always too soft, and he’d taken a shine to Sef, but in time he would get over it.
The Skater smiled bitterly. I am going to curse myselffor this in the morning…
But it was very clear to him how the land lay just now. The lake-dwellers wanted her back, but not because she was their slave – a class uncared for and unmourned from what Sef had said. They wanted her back simply because she could tell people about them.
And so can I.
Once they had Sef, they would have no need of Nivit either, not to pay for his services, nor to suffer to talk.
He rushed to the rear of the shack, grabbing Sef’s wrist and dragging her into Skrit’s room. Here was one of his secrets, and he saw Skrit staring up blearily at him from her bed, wondering what was going on. However Nivit was not interested in her but in the crank at the back.
Most Skaters were not Apt: they were not a technical race, not given to artifice or machines. There was a minority that were, though, and this was growing, generation to generation, as Nivit’s kinden slowly underwent a transformation.
Nivit himself was Apt, and he wound the crank as hard as his skinny arms could manage, till a hatch opened smoothly and silently onto a back-alley, even as a mailed fist rapped sharply at his door.
He cocked his head at the new-gaping entrance, and Sef stared at him wide-eyed.
‘Go,’ he hissed, but it took Skrit pushing her forward before she realized what he meant. She looked almost more frightened to be forced to escape alone than on first scenting the lake-dwellers coming.
Then Nivit was padding for the door to confront them, one hand close to his knife-hilt.
Sef shivered in the sudden cold outside, finding herself on an unfamiliar street in this horrible abscess of a community, alone out under the great dark sky. She was glad for the darkness, both because it would hide her from the servants of Master Saltwheel (although not the master himself, for he was proof against the dark) and because she had not yet adjusted to being exposed beneath the sun and her skin burnt red after only a touch of it.
But here she was lost on the streets of this place called Jerez, and somewhere, somewhere close, there would be Master Saltwheel and his servants and slaves patiently groping through the dark for her, and she had nowhere to go. The Skater Nivit had just cast her out. The land-Beetle Bellowern was now dead, his floating palace sacked and his men slain. She was utterly alone.
She had fled the lake because she had known that there was a world out there beyond its skin. She had never guessed how different it would be, though. So many times she had gone from the jewelled envelope of Scolaris up to the lake-top, to gather air and to spy on the busy, spindly-limbed surface dwellers. She had never guessed how difficult it would be to actually live out here, with the heat and the cold, the wind and the appalling void of the sky above. She wanted now to go home to the great arched chambers of Scolaris, but that was one place she could never return to. In the final analysis there was only one star in the sky for her to aim at.
She must find Gaved. He could protect her from the great world and from Master Saltwheel. He had gone across the waters, though, with those others: the stern killer and his Spider-kinden student, and the angry one who hated everyone and himself as well. They had gone to get something that they needed.
She looked down and found that her feet had taken her, without pause or thought, straight to the edge of the lake.
Down there, in the fathoms of darkness, hung the bright cities of her people, stolen from them by the Beetle-kinden, but she was just one missing slave. With the precautions she had taken to mask her scent they would not realize at once that she had returned to the water. If she was swift, she could find Gaved before they detected her, and Saltwheel would still be searching the streets of Jerez, never guessing that she had returned to the waters.
She sloughed off the clothes they had given her, as she would need to swim swiftly tonight. She called on her Art, surrounding herself with a coat of air to sustain her.
A moment later she had sliced into the water in a smooth dive, carrying a silvery sheen with her, next to her skin. With a speed that no land-dweller could have matched she darted off into the water, heading further out into the lake.
‘My next lot, then,’ the Fly-kinden called, in a high voice cutting across the crowd. ‘A folio of plans and designs with alchemical notation dated to within fifty years either side of the Pathic revolution. Their condition is poor, but more than six in ten of the papers can be read. This item is believed to originate in what is now Collegium and represents the much-debated “Illuminate” school of semi-scientific thought.’
He strutted back and forth on his raised platform while a Skater-kinden servant carefully displayed a crumbling leather folder that rested on a silver tray under the cover of a parasol. To Thalric it looked like much of nothing, but there was a quickening of interest amid the small crowd of buyers and their servants. He had not considered that this would be an auction of more than one treasure, but he realised now that Scyla had been stockpiling a few choice acquisitions for just such an opportunity as this, and therefore perhaps many of the buyers now here would have no interest in the box whatsoever.
Scyla herself had made no appearance, or at least not that he could tell. Her proxy here was doing a fair enough job of managing the bidding, encouraging, jibing, pushing up the price, whilst she presumably waited around in the shadows somewhere, hiding behind someone else’s face.
Bidding on the mouldering documents was brisk, and Thalric wondered what truths they might contain, what secrets of the days when the artificer’s craft was just dragging itself out of the morass of mysticism. No doubt it would moulder afresh in the private collection of one of these plutarchs here. He saw a pair of Beetle-kinden bidding against each other stolidly, with single fingers lifted to advise the auctioneer, and a Wasp-kinden woman as well, elegant and grey, her eyes sharp. He wondered whether she was somehow wealthy in her own right,
or whether she was merely acting as factor for another.
Probably the documents, however old they looked, were faked. That seemed more than likely, for few here had any idea just how easily Scyla could make herself disappear, so that there would be no direct repercussions for her.
The rain was starting up: the venue had a waxed canvas extended over the auctioneer’s podium to keep his wares dry, but the buyers themselves sat on benches out on the open deck. Thalric guessed that this temporary raft might not have supported the weight of a roof and, anyway, the Skaters were not known for the solidity of their architecture.
He had not noticed which, but one of the Beetles had become the lucky owner of the documents, so the Fly-kinden, dressed as elaborately as any servant to Spider-kinden princesses, now trotted out the next lot: an enamelled silver statue in the Commonweal style, beautiful in execution and pornographic in subject matter, with the acrobatic couple’s wings delicately picked out in gold lace.
Thalric passed his eyes over the audience for the hundredth time. There was no possibility of finding Scyla in it. He had thought that their association would have allowed him to spot… just something, some gesture, some stance, but she was as anonymous as a corpse on a battlefield, lost amongst the flesh of others. There were plenty of others, too, for nobody had been so trusting as to come here alone. Thalric’s little band had therefore attracted no comment.
The Fly continued his banter, up on his stage, the treasures of the world passing through his hands. Some of the bidders left, their one goal attained or thwarted. Most were staying on. There was a feeling – Thalric caught the scent of it – of anticipation, as if they had only been marking time for something greater.
‘My final lot, then,’ announced the Fly-kinden, and Thalric went cold within himself. It was not the proprietary tone, which the Fly had been using throughout, or the fact that the small wooden box had not been presented by a servant but plucked straight from a pocket. Rather it was something in the tilt of the head, that way of standing, that was familiar to Thalric. He was trained to recognize such things, to see through disguises.
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