Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  A lumpy straw mattress and a sour, stale smell. If this was a liaison then she was certainly slumming it.

  Bolwyn’s betrayal! It was all she could do not to open her eyes, to leap off the mattress. Bolwyn’s betrayal, then dashing for the alley mouth, two dead Wasps on her slope-shouldered conscience that seemed to be able to shrug them off so easily, but where was she now?

  Her head ached abominably. She must have struck it on something.

  She had got out into the street. More Wasps had been coming, cutting furrows through the crowd. Her bloody sword had been like a talisman to clear the way for her. She had tried to cut her way back, find Che and Salma, but there were Wasps and town militia approaching, and she had been driven further and further.

  She had been exhausted. She had run and run and Helleron had always been there. In the end she had been running to escape the city itself, and failed.

  It had consumed her.

  So, she was in its bowels. With the most careful of movements, eyes still tight shut, she felt for her blade. Gone. She wore nothing but a shift. Where had she run to? Her mind simply did not have the answers.

  It was time. She finally opened her eyes.

  On a filthy mattress, covered by a stained sheet, in some tiny room with one slit window.

  There was a chair across from her, near the doorless doorway. A small man was dozing in it, and carelessly slung over its back—

  She was on her feet before she could stop herself, but silently, silent as her kind could be. In two steps she was within reach, and she had the hilt in her hand. She slid it from its scabbard.

  That woke him, the whisper of steel on leather beside his ear. Even as he jumped she had the blade beneath his chin, drawing a bead of blood as he started. He was a halfbreed, she saw, looked like Beetle and Fly-kinden in there and perhaps more. He stood very still. He only had a knife himself but kept his hands far from it as if to reassure her.

  ‘Where am I?’ she hissed.

  ‘Malia’s house,’ he croaked, eyes flicking from her to the blade.

  ‘And who’s Malia that I should know her?’

  ‘She’s my chief. She’s important. You don’t mess with her.’ His voice shook as he said it, though. She smiled cruelly.

  ‘Well maybe I want to give this Malia a message. Maybe you’re the message, what do you think? So tell me something useful.’

  ‘I – I – I – I don’t know. What do you—? You were just brought in. I don’t know. I just got told to watch you,’ he stammered.

  ‘Why?’

  A woman’s voice, from the doorway: ‘Why talk to the little finger when the face is here?’

  Tynisa jumped back, rapier extended in a duellist’s guard. The newcomer was a woman of beyond middle years, greying, but lean and solidly built. She wore the under- and over-robes that the Helleren favoured, but she was Ant-kinden and still retained that race’s warrior stance. Her shortsword stayed in its sheath. Given the confidence in her, it was obviously a pointed statement.

  Tynisa slowly lowered the blade until the tip was close to the floor. She could bring it up at a moment’s notice, but for now she wanted to talk. ‘And you’re Malia?’

  ‘That I am.’ The woman surveyed her dispassionately. ‘You bounced back quickly, child.’ Her voice still had a little of the Ant formality about it.

  ‘I’m no child.’

  ‘That remains to be seen. You owe me.’

  ‘For bed and board?’ Tynisa said contemptuously. ‘What, didn’t you have any stables you could sling me in?’

  A quirk at the corner of Malia’s mouth. ‘This is Helleron. Here this is luxury accommodation. You owe me because you killed one of my people.’

  ‘When?’ Tynisa grasped at those parts of the previous day that still eluded her. ‘When did I?’ Is she with the Empire?

  ‘Oh, he went for you first, but that makes no difference.’ Malia folded her arms across her chest. ‘He always was a fool, and when you ran in, sword all red, he clearly decided you were for target practice.’

  A thought, an image, the scattered shards of the previous day now drifting ever closer. A man pointing a short-bow at her, letting loose an arrow. It had passed across her back, ruffling her cloak, and she had gone for him. She had been moving without thought by then, reflex to reflex.

  ‘I killed him.’ She had cut the bow in half as he raised it to defend himself, and a twist of the wrist had turned the move into a lunge that had opened his throat.

  ‘And you injured four others of mine,’ Malia said. ‘They went to help the man you killed. You bloodied them all before one of them got a club against your head. And here you are with your sword pointed at Auntie Malia, to whom you owe so much.’

  ‘They’re not debts I recognize.’ Another dead man. Tynisa barely felt the weight.

  ‘If you think I can’t draw sword and kill you, then you had better think again,’ Malia said, in all seriousness. ‘I might be a matron now, but I was a duellist and assassin in my time, and I never gave up the sword habit.’

  Tynisa slowly, deliberately, raised the sword until it was directed at her. ‘But?’ she prompted.

  Malia’s twitch turned into a full, grudging smile. ‘But I might have other uses for you. Sword’s point, child! Who are you? You raise a stink around Hammerstake Street. You leave a neat set of dead men for the guard to puzzle over. You cross three separate fiefs trailing your bloody sword, and you end up on my back porch brawling with my men. And brawling well, for there’s not one of them who shouldn’t be grateful for the lesson in swordsmanship.’

  ‘I need to find some friends of mine,’ Tynisa said levelly.

  ‘As I said, you owe me,’ Malia told her. ‘Now, you can add to your credit, if you want, and I can have people keep an open eye. But you owe me, and I have a use for you.’

  Here it comes. ‘And what might that be?’ The slit window would not have fit a Flychild. If she wanted to get out of here the hard way it would have to be through Malia. The woman could have been lying, of course, but Ants were warrior-bred from birth.

  ‘You owe me,’ Malia repeated. ‘I owe other people in our fief and you’d make a fine gift for them.’

  ‘Slavery?’ spat Tynisa, and Malia raised a hand to quiet her.

  ‘You don’t understand where you are or how things work, child, so keep your anger until you can use it. If I had a choice I’d find work for you myself, put you on my books. Teaching sword, perhaps. Or using it. As it is, I think I’ll send your talents up the ladder. I’ll be quits, and you’ll have a better chance to do whatever you need to, so long as you remember that you owe. And when you owe, you do what you’re told.’

  ‘What’s to stop me just running, as soon as I get the chance?’

  Malia nodded. ‘Intelligent questions, good. Firstly, you’d be hunted. Secondly, I’m guessing you are already hunted, and the fief will be able to shelter you if you keep faith with us. Thirdly, if you want to find someone in Helleron, there are a lot of doors to knock on if you’re on your own. Fourth and last, you never know, you might actually like it in the fief. You seem just the type.’

  Tynisa lowered the sword again. ‘And what is a fief?’

  ‘It’s like a family, and a city, and a factory all in one, child,’ Malia said. She turned and began to descend the stairs, and without options Tynisa sheathed her blade, slung the baldric over her shoulder, and followed.

  ‘A family because you do what your elders tell you, and they take care of you,’ Malia called back to her. ‘A city because there are rulers and subjects, and territory that must be defended. A factory because we’re all so very, very busy making things. Although most of what we make is what other people would call trouble.’

  ‘You’re a gang then? Criminals!’ Tynisa started.

  ‘That we are, child. One of a few hundred spread across Helleron, and neither the least nor the greatest. We’re the Halfway House, and I think you’ll fit in just perfectly.’

  A rain had swept
down off the mountains to attempt the futile task of trying to wash Helleron clean. After it had filtered through the smog of the factories it was greasy on the skin, stinging in the eyes. Che and Salma sheltered in the townhouse’s doorway, and she hung on the bell-rope again, hearing the distant tinkle from within the house.

  The slot beside her head flicked open. ‘I told you to go away,’ said the appalled voice of the servant. ‘I shall call the watch.’

  ‘Please tell Master Monger that I’m here,’ she said. ‘I am his cousin.’

  ‘Master Monger is not at home to vagrants,’ the servant told her – and this after she and Salma had changed back into their proper clothes. She reflected that if Salma was a vagrant, he was the best-dressed one in the world.

  ‘But I’m family!’ she insisted.

  ‘Master Monger is too wise to fall for such a ploy, urchin,’ said the narrow piece of servant she could spy through the slot. ‘I swear that I shall call the watch. Be off with you.’

  ‘I . . .’ A stubborn streak took hold of Che. ‘Hammer and tongs!’ she swore, just like Uncle Stenwold. ‘I am not moving off this doorstep until you fetch Master Elias Monger, and when he finds out how you have treated me, then by all the coin in the mint, he will have you thrashed!’

  The silence that followed this outburst was broken at last only by Salma’s quiet chuckle.

  ‘I should do as she says,’ he confirmed quietly. ‘I would if I were in your shoes.’

  The slot slammed shut and they could hear the man pattering off into the house. Elias Monger’s townhouse was not one of the villas on the hill itself, though it was practically at the hill’s foot. Cousin Elias had clearly been doing well for himself, even if his hospitality left something to be desired.

  ‘Well,’ said Salma after a moment, ‘I don’t know if they’re going to let us in or set the watch-bugs on us, but you’ve certainly made an impact.’

  ‘I . . . don’t know what came over me,’ she said, feeling a little giddy. A moment later they heard the sound of feet approaching, several pairs of them. They took a step back from the door and Che smoothed down the front of her tunic.

  When the door opened there were two armed men standing there, not soldiers but solid Beetle-kinden nonetheless with studded clubs and a couple of shields that had probably been adorning the wall until a moment ago. To Che’s credit they looked nervous. Behind them was a lean, pinch-mouthed man she recognized as the servant, and beside him a shorter, fuller-figured individual with a thunderous frown on his face. He had a scroll in one hand and a reservoir pen in the other, obviously called to the door from the middle of his book-keeping.

  ‘Now what is this? Grace and favour, but I can’t be doing with these interruptions!’ he snapped. ‘I suggest the pair of you make yourselves scarce before my men give you a richly deserved beating.’

  ‘Master Monger?’ Che said meekly. ‘My name is Cheerwell Maker and I have come here from Collegium. Uncle Stenwold sent me.’

  Monger made to give some derisive reply, but then paused and squinted at her. From a chain about his neck he brought up a monocle to his eye. ‘Cheerwell?’ he said suspiciously.

  ‘My father is Dorvy Maker, sir, but Uncle Stenwold took me in. I’ve been studying at the Great College.’

  ‘Oh, Dorvy’s child.’ There was no great love in the words, but Che was already aware that her parents were from the less reputable end of the family. ‘Cheerwell,’ Monger mused. ‘That does sound familiar. Who’s this other fellow?’

  ‘Oh, this is Salma—’ Che started, and then stopped herself. ‘Excuse me, this is Prince Salme Dien of the Commonweal. He would also like to guest at your house, cousin.’

  Salma, on cue, executed an elaborate genuflection, something exotic from his homeland. Monger’s mouth picked up.

  ‘Well, a Commonwealer.’ Whatever he had heard about Salma’s people, it obviously included something good, or at least profitable, because his reserve was fast diminishing. ‘A prince of the Commonweal and my own dear cousin Cheerwell? Remarkable days indeed.’ He gave the snide servant a look of exasperation. ‘Really, I can only apologize for the zeal of my staff. You must understand that we have a great many callers of a less than savoury nature. Please come in, do come in.’

  She had walked a fine line in telling Elias their story, and did not want to compromise him by naming names and allegiances. So it was that she patched together something close enough to the truth to resemble it at a distance. She and her friends had been sent to Helleron on some undefined business by Stenwold. They had been attacked in the street, although she did not know by whom, or why. They had been scattered in the fray and two were still missing. She and Salma needed a place to stay until Stenwold arrived, and they needed their host’s help.

  Despite her obfuscation she guessed that Elias had read between the lines well enough. He seemed to understand that, under the circumstances, Totho and Tynisa would not be making it easy to be found.

  ‘I’ll send the word round to my foremen and factors to look out for them,’ he promised them over dinner. ‘I’ll post up a bit of a reward, as well. There are a whole breed of people in this city for whom finding other people is a way of life.’ Finding other people who don’t want to be found. The words hung unsaid in the air.

  ‘Do you think it’s wise, to just . . .’ Che squirmed, knowing that whatever word was now put out would reach their enemies soon enough.

  ‘My dear girl,’ Elias told her. ‘What else can we do? Otherwise it’s like looking for someone in a crowded plaza by blindfolding yourself and whispering their name. Don’t worry. I’m not without influence in this city. I have seven factories and a mining concern, and that means that when I speak, people listen. We’ll have your fellows safe within these walls before you know it. Just give it a few days.’

  Che toyed with her food, glanced at Salma and saw her own concern mirrored in his easy smile. Helleron was vast, her friends were small, and the Wasp Empire that had taken such an interest in them would not rest. She could not imagine Elias Monger’s connections working faster than the Wasps’ implacable malice. Hour by hour a dreadful cold feeling was growing in her chest, as she thought of Tynisa and Totho.

  There was a Fly-run eatery on Bleek Street where Sinon Halfway, leader of the Halfway House cartel, held court. Court it was, too, Tynisa realized at once. Malia brought her into a long room decked out in Fly style, with a low table taking up much of the floor. Some half-dozen Fly-kinden staff were serving three dozen men and women, and it was evident to Tynisa from first glance that there was a right end and a wrong end of the table to be kneeling at. The right end was closest to the enthroned figure of Sinon Halfway himself.

  He was a lean man just turning to fat around the middle, due to the few years now when he had not personally taken up a sword to defend his empire. He was dressed like a man about to flee the city with all his wealth upon him, but she saw that all of them were, more or less, for aside from a few who looked ostentatiously spartan, the gangsters sported chains and rings, amulets and jewelled gorgets, even in one case a mail shirt made from coins, good silver Standards of Helleron mint. Sinon would have been worth, in gold and gems alone, as much as half the table, and she understood that it was a status thing. A wealthy man who hid his light under a bushel would gain no respect for that here.

  The name told true. Sinon was a halfbreed, and she guessed that he was Moth-kinden interbred with the pale-skinned Ants of Tark. What should have been an unpleasant mottling had instead left him with milky skin traced with veins and twists of grey, like marble. It was an exotic, oddly attractive sight. His hair was dark, worn long over his shoulders in a Spider style. His eyes were just dark pupils circled in white, without irises. The melange of his ancestry had conspired to make a man at once unnerving and compelling.

  ‘So Malia has brought me a gift,’ he said, and the conversation about the table immediately stopped, each gangster looking across or craning over to see her. Malia left her side then
, taking her place at Sinon’s right hand.

  ‘Delightful,’ said Sinon. His mouth and voice were amused, his eyes unreadable. ‘But I’m told that you’re not just here for ornament. Malia says you can fight. What’s your name, Spiderchild?’

  ‘Tynisa, Master Sinon.’ She hadn’t meant the honorific. Some holdover from childhood had brought it out of her.

  ‘And well-mannered too, such a rare combination. And you understand that you owe me a debt, a debt that Malia here has passed on to me.’

  ‘I’ve been told it,’ Tynisa replied. A murmur of laughter passed through the gangsters at her attitude. Only those closest to the head of the table were untouched by it.

  ‘And can you fight?’ Sinon asked her politely.

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Well, then, there may be a place for you at my table,’ Sinon said. ‘But I understand you need my help, Spiderchild. Malia’s already told me your little story. Help me and then perhaps I can spare some help for you.’

  She realized that she was reacting too much, taking too little control. She narrowed her eyes, clenched her fists, stared at Sinon. ‘So,’ she demanded. ‘Where do I sit?’

  There was a ragged murmur of approval from the gangsters, but Sinon held up a hand for silence, and got it. ‘Don’t get too fond of her,’ he warned his people. ‘She doesn’t know our traditions yet. You sit, Spiderchild, where you want, but be aware that for you to have any elbow room everyone moves down a seat. Now you tell me where you sit.’

  Tynisa let herself pause. She would not jump as soon as Sinon cracked the whip. Has it come to this? she thought. What would Stenwold say? Sinon was talking about fighting for blood, just to join in his little clique. The fiefs of Helleron had harsh and simple rules. At what point do I become one of them? When I draw their blood? When I take their place?

  She wondered if she could still refuse now, if she could flee – a sudden dash down the hall, out of the building, onto the unknown streets of Helleron. And then what? She would never find Che or the others on her own. She needed help, and this thief, this killer, was apparently the only help she had.