Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I’d guess some competitor of Elias,’ she mused. ‘I get the impression they take their business very seriously in Helleron.’

  ‘Never a truer word spoken,’ said Salma, heartfelt.

  There was a hauling engine just setting off for the city, she noticed, with crates of iron taking up most of the flatbed behind the stacks of its wood-burning furnace. But it carried three long, shrouded burdens as well, surely nothing other than the corpses of miners or guardsmen. She had heard Elias giving orders to the driver a moment before, issuing instructions to bring back some artillery. Whatever had happened here, nobody believed it was over.

  At last Elias turned back to them, still with a half-dozen menials waiting anxiously to report. ‘This is a wretched business,’ he said, twisting the rings on his fingers. ‘I sometimes wonder why I ever got into it.’

  ‘What happened here?’ Che asked him. ‘Who attacked them?’

  Elias sighed. ‘This was going on when I first took to the factories, but then we made the treaty and everything went quiet. Ideal time to get into the mining game, you’d have thought. So look at me now: two days behind on deliveries and I don’t even want to think about the repair costs. It’s not as though Helleron’s ever packed with tramp artificers kicking their heels for want of work, and now there’ll be a half-dozen other mine owners bidding against me.’

  ‘But who did it? Someone wants to force you out and take over?’

  He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Force me out is right, but not the rest of it. If they even wanted the workings here, then at least I’d understand. There’d be a basis for negotiation. I’d even sell up, for a price. But these bastards – excuse my language, Cheerwell – these wretches, they just want us gone.’ He saw her confusion and said, ‘It’s the Moth-kinden from Tharn. Just because they like to mooch around up there in their caves chanting and mumbling to themselves, they take offence if anyone actually wants to make use of the place.’

  ‘Moth-kinden?’ Che couldn’t quite grasp it. ‘But I thought they were—’

  ‘A gaggle of hermits minding their own business?’ Elias suggested. ‘Think again, Cheerwell. We’ve always had problems with this lot because they’re as militant as they come. They just don’t want us anywhere near their precious sacred mountain, and every time we come to terms about our mining operations, give it just a few years and they’re back. Raids, thefts, murder, and sabotage! Don’t start me on the sabotage. Just because they don’t know what a cog does or how a lever works, it doesn’t mean they can’t find a way to break the most sophisticated equipment when they put their bloody minds to it.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to send a messenger to parlay with them?’

  ‘They’d probably kill anyone I sent to them,’ Elias growled. ‘They only talk when they want to. They come down to us when they’ve had enough. No, if I had my way, I’d get together with the other mine owners and put an airfleet together, sort them out once and for all. For now, though, I’m going to get some repeating ballista, some flarecasters and a squad more crossbowmen, and we’ll see if they’re stupid enough to come back tonight.’

  He stormed off, still with a trail of anxious clerks and foremen shadowing him.

  Che turned to Salma. ‘You heard that?’

  ‘Every word,’ he said. ‘And I wondered, once these veins are exhausted, and if the Helleren started looking to the north of here, coming along with their rails and their engines – I wondered what my people’s reaction would be.’

  ‘You can’t be condoning this!’ she hissed.

  He held a hand up, and took her aside to somewhere the miners and their watchmen could not overhear.

  ‘Until you have heard it from all sides, don’t be so quick to judge. My people could not endure to live with this on our borders, and if we refused them, how long before the Helleren found some excuse to come anyway.’

  ‘Salma, you’re talking about my people, my family.’ His words hurt her more than she would have thought, and she wondered if that was because she knew there was some truth in them.

  ‘Well,’ he said with a shrug, ‘it’s moot, as north of here isn’t Commonweal any more anyway.’ His smile cut her with its bitterness. ‘It’s Empire all the way.’

  Scuto shambled back into his workshop. It had been the best part of an hour since he stepped outside for a whispered conversation with a young Fly-kinden, clearly one of his agents. Totho had spent the time disassembling one of his air-batteries and planning a few improvements to it. He could never just sit idle. His artificer’s hands needed work, to stop his mind from worrying. He jumped up as the Thorn Bug returned.

  ‘Well,’ Scuto said. ‘Whatever else happened to your friends, the Wasps didn’t get ’em. Looks like all three made a run for it. Shame they didn’t follow you.’

  ‘Any idea where they ran to?’ Totho asked.

  ‘In Helleron it’s like leaving tracks in water,’ Scuto said. ‘Still, I have my eyes and my ears, and looks like your girl, the Spider one, went places even I’d not go without an escort. She must have cut through two fiefs at least. People that way don’t like answering questions, but I’ll see what I can do.’ He shook his head. ‘You people, you’re such a mix of craft and cack-handedness. I can’t make you out.’ He settled himself across the workbench from Totho, who heard the scrape of his spines against the wood. ‘You give the Wasps the slip, which is good form, but then you got no fallback arranged, so the four of you just go gadding off through the city. What were you thinking?’

  ‘We weren’t expecting there would be trouble,’ Totho said. He tried to state it as a reasonable point, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

  ‘You must always plan a fallback,’ Scuto told him. ‘Last year Sten sent me and some lads to Sarn. Safe enough, you’d think, what with the Ants there behaving ’emselves these days, but we fell real foul. If we’d not had some rendezvous arranged in advance I’d still be there looking for ’em all. Mind you, that was just pure bad luck and accident, ’cos we ran bang into some Arcanum business that had nothing to do with us.’

  ‘What’s an Arcanum?’

  ‘If you don’t know, you don’t need to know,’ Scuto told him, and promptly added, ‘Moth-kinden stuff, anyway. Loose cogs, the lot of ’em.’ He put a thorny finger into the workings of the air-battery.

  ‘Master Scuto, shouldn’t we be . . . doing something?’

  Scuto raised a thorny eyebrow. ‘Like what, boy? Want to go onto the streets and hand out fliers? Stand on a roof and shout their names?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Sten really did send you out not knowing the half of it,’ the Thorn Bug continued sadly. ‘Boy, a good agent’s got to learn how to wait. My people are asking questions. All we’d do ourselves is get in the way, and maybe get you caught by the Wasps. Founder’s mark, boy, do none of you know anything about the trade? Who are you clowns anyway, really?’

  ‘Just College students.’ Totho shrugged. ‘Master Maker, I don’t think he meant it to come to this. Not this soon.’

  ‘That man uses the Great College like his own personal militia,’ grumbled Scuto. ‘You all artificers?’

  ‘We’re all duellists, I suppose. That was the link. Tynisa and Salma were good at it, anyway. And then there’s Che – Cheerwell, rather. She’s Stenwold’s niece.’ Totho looked at his hands. ‘I hope . . . I hope she’s all right. She’s not as tough as the others.’

  Scuto made an unpleasant noise that Totho realized was laughter. ‘Sounds as though you’re after the foreman’s daughter,’ he said. A suggestive leer from the Thorn Bug-kinden was worth three from anyone else.

  ‘I . . . well . . . A little.’ Totho did not know where to put himself. ‘But, I’m a halfbreed, you know, so . . .’

  ‘So much for that,’ Scuto agreed. ‘Don’t need to tell me, boy. I couldn’t get myself into the worst brothel in Helleron even if I was made of solid gold with platinum clothes.’ He looked Totho over, sympathy sitting
awkwardly on his nightmare face. ‘Let’s change the subject, take your mind off things, shall we? Let’s look at this air-battery of yours. Weapons, you reckon?’

  ‘Once the air pressure is high enough it can be directed out. The force of it is quite remarkable.’ Totho, too was glad to settle on less uncomfortable topics.

  Scuto nodded. ‘You ever get your hands on a nailbow?’

  ‘Only models at the College, but I’ve seen them used. They did a demonstration.’ Despite the hollow, sick feeling in Totho’s stomach when he thought of Che all alone in Helleron, this simple talk of mechanical things was working to calm him.

  The Thorn Bug grinned. ‘I love ’em. They work basically on the same principle as this toy of yours, only instead of air pressure they use a firepowder charge to send a bolt as long as your finger through steel plate. Bang! Noisy as all get out, and they jam often as not, and firepowder’s just asking for trouble. I heard that if the nailbow gets too hot, then it just blows itself apart and takes matey the operator with it. So you were thinking of using your bottled air to send a crossbow bolt?’

  ‘A smaller missile would be better, though. I see what you mean.’

  ‘Right, tell you another thing.’ Scuto’s grin broadened. ‘Last year this fellow Balkus came to me, kind of an off-and-on friend. Ant renegade from Sarn. He’s a nailbowman. Used to be in their army squad down there until he went rogue. He wanted me to make the thing more reliable. What I did is, I lengthened the barrel that the bolts come out of, and I machined a groove down it, in a spiral. Still jams like a bastard, but when it fires he can get half again as far, without much worry of missing. You reckon this business of yours here would benefit from the same deal?’

  Totho turned the idea over in his mind. He could see the reasoning behind it falling into place, and felt strangely excited by it. Nobody at the College had ever taken his ideas seriously. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I absolutely do.’

  ‘Well, then, while Scuto’s little army is out tracking your friends down, why don’t you and I have a little brainstorming session and see if we can’t make this thing a reality?’

  The Halfway House had been quick to accept her. She had been surprised, as she had expected reprisals for the man she killed. There was no comeback, though, even from his countrymen. The moment he had hit the ground he was nothing.

  She could easily have forgotten him herself. In the round of greetings, introductions, boasts and invitations that followed, nobody seemed to recall that her new place at the table was still warm from another’s body. Sinon Halfway kept no empty seats. There were always hopefuls, coming off the street, wanting to sit at his table.

  Later, he gave her two gold rings and a clasp in the shape of a centipede eating its own tail. ‘You should have these,’ he said laconically.

  ‘Some girls just expect flowers.’ She examined the pieces critically: heavy and crude, like most of the affectation the Halfway House favoured.

  Sinon relaxed back on the pillow next to her. ‘They’re not love tokens, my devious lady. They’re your share of Pallus’s stake, after I took what he owed me.

  She tried to see the trinkets in a different light, to attach some emotional significance to them, the estate of a dead man, but she could not. They were also worth more money than she had personally ever held before, even at black-market prices.

  Since sitting at his table she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Sinon to discuss her alleged indebtedness to him. She knew the moment was coming, but it was a day and a night now since she had killed the Ant – Pallus, as she had just discovered. She had taken her chances then, sitting high at the table, turning her College games to a deadly serious business. And I did it for Che, and the others, and she could tell herself that as often as she liked.

  And Sinon had asked her to his bed. He had not demanded: it was not some tithe he exacted from all the women of the Halfway House. He simply let her know that he had an interest, and in the end she had agreed. She needed to cement her foothold within the fief, and she would have more leverage with him after she had lain with him. Also she had wanted to see him, see the whole of that marbled skin spread out before her. He intrigued her, so unlike the pariah halfbreeds she had previously known. He was a more exciting lover by far than those – fewer than most thought – that she had taken at the College. Exciting because he was older than her, and sly, and exciting because he was dangerous. He was a gangster and a killer and his will now shadowed her life. In lying with him she took hold of some of that power and controlled it. It was an old game.

  And yet, as they grappled, the thought had come to her, Is this what it would be like with Salma? and she had tried to see that storm-sky skin for a moment as bright daylight gold.

  Now they lay together in the room of a taverna Sinon had picked out, with a dozen of his heavies on watch in the common room below, and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, the dead man’s gold now off his hands. She could have slit his throat there and then, or perhaps he was secretly tensed, just waiting to see if she would turn on him. Spiders, after all, had a certain reputation.

  ‘You owe me,’ he said.

  ‘And was that part of the payment?’

  His eyes flicked open. ‘That was something between us, was it not? A mutual benefit?’ To her surprise he sounded just a little hurt. Men and their egos. She smiled at him.

  ‘So I owe you?’

  ‘Tynisa, dear lady, you’re someone who gives the impression that you won’t be with us for long, one way or the other. You have your own path and I’d not begrudge you that.’

  She raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you owe me and debts must be paid. If I do not enforce that rule, I’m nothing. You owe me for Malia’s dead man, and you owe me for the help you’ve asked of me. But it’s your choice whether you pay that off all at once, or break it up into pieces.’

  ‘All at once, if I can,’ she said instantly. ‘No offence.’

  ‘Honesty never offends me,’ he told her. ‘Which is not to say that I haven’t had men killed for it.’ His expression was infinitely mild, infinitely truthful. ‘I will have a job for you, I think, that will make us quits, and once you’ve done it I already have a lead on your friends.’

  Her heart leapt. ‘Stenwold’s family?’

  ‘No, we tried there but they’ve seen nobody. Another lead, but a good one – only when we’re quits.’

  There was a gentle knock on the door.

  ‘Chief,’ said the voice of the white-skinned giant. ‘It’s starting to move down here.’

  ‘We’ll be there,’ Sinon called back, and slid out of bed, slipping into his clothes. Tynisa followed suit, taking one more look across the streaked skin of his muscled back before it disappeared beneath his tunic.

  ‘So what’s this job you want from me?’ she asked.

  ‘It will depend on how this goes now,’ he said, but from his tone she guessed there was little argument about it.

  Down below, his men were all on their feet, tense. The white giant was marshalling them with curving gestures of his huge claws. He was Scorpion-kinden, she understood, exiled from the Dryclaw Desert south of Helleron. They called him Akta Barik.

  ‘All ready to go, chief,’ he said. His voice was quiet and he spoke slowly and with great precision, to avoid mumbling through those jutting fangs. ‘Just got word: their man’s on his way.’

  ‘So what is this?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a formal way of settling the disputes, so that everyone can see how it falls out.’

  ‘Sounds a bit above board for your types,’ she said. He threw her an amused look.

  ‘I didn’t say it was the only way, or even the final way.’ He surveyed his men and addressed them peremptorily. ‘Fighters, do me proud.’ No more speech than that. When the door was opened, there were eight of them went stepping into the street, and neither Sinon nor Barik was amongst them. The street was clear, or at least clear in front of the taverna.
A safe distance either side, quite a crowd had gathered.

  ‘Did Barik say their man?’ Tynisa asked. ‘Just one?’

  Sinon nodded. ‘That was the arrangement.’

  ‘But . . . eight on one?’

  He gave her a look that was not filled with optimism, and went to the doorway to watch.

  A disturbance in the crowd showed people pressing away very hurriedly. Someone was coming who parted them just by word of his approach. Tynisa saw the eight Halfway House combatants tense, spreading out into a loose semi-circle to await his approach.

  He stepped clear of the crowd at last: a tall Mantis-kinden, strangely dressed. She saw a green-dyed arming doublet, slit from wrist to elbow for his forearm spines; breeches and boots of darker green; a brooch pin of gold, a sword through a circle, ringing vague bells in her memory. He had no rapier, such as she would expect of a Mantis duellist. Instead there was a metal gauntlet on his right arm with a two-foot blade projecting from the glove.

  He walked, very deliberately, until he was at the very centre of the circle his opponents had half-made. He stood with his arms by his sides, feet close together, looking slightly down.

  ‘A Weaponsmaster,’ she identified at last. ‘I didn’t think there were any left.’

  Sinon just grunted, watching, and she still could not understand it: eight men against one, even a Mantis, even a Weaponsmaster, for what that was worth. They had shortswords, maces, offhand daggers; one even had a spear. She looked at them and saw they were not confident. Each was waiting for another to make the first move. The crowd had settled into a rapturous hush.

  The Mantis drew his weapon arm up, crooking it across his body with the blade pointed downwards, folded back along his arm. He finally looked up.

  One of the men shouted at him, a wordless yell, and they descended upon him at once, six coming at him from three sides, and two bursting into flight to take him from above. In the instant before he was eclipsed from her sight Tynisa did not even see the man react.