‘I’ll take you up on that,’ Thalric said. He sensed the woman stiffen slightly: a Wasp’s pride against being passed from hand to hand like a chattel. She was a chattel, though, merely a slave and a commodity. There was no more to it than that.
Thalric raised a goblet, and he and Ulther touched rims across the face of Captain Oltan.
‘Here’s to “memorable”,’ said Thalric, but he felt sad as he said it. Memorable, yes, but for all the wrong reasons.
Ulther settled more comfortably into his padded throne. ‘Speaking of memorable, or so I hope, I have now a little entertainment for you: a new jewel in my collection. I even understand that you yourself escorted her to my city.’
Thalric raised an eyebrow, even as he filed the repeated my city away for later perusal.
In answer, Ulther clapped his hands once more and the serving slaves retreated several steps behind the crescent of chairs. A moment later two men walked in, of local appearance. One was white-haired and bearded, and he cradled a stringed instrument that Thalric did not recognize, something like a stretched lyre. The other was little more than a boy and carried a small drum. They made themselves unobtrusive amongst the pillars and sat waiting. Thalric had already guessed what would come next, for a pair of soldiers then led the Butterfly-kinden dancer into the hall. Aagen’s special delivery. Inwardly, he made another note.
‘Well at least take the chain off her,’ Ulther directed. ‘She’s not a performing felbling.’
One of the soldiers closed the door whilst the other carefully unlatched the chain from the woman’s collar.
Thalric sipped his wine, which was sweeter than his taste preferred, and settled in for a wait. He had never much appreciated dancers or the like. He had caught a glimpse of this one performing before and she was good, but it was not his choice of entertainment.
The woman, named Grief in Chains as he recalled, stepped out until she was within a shaft of sunlight. It fed her skin so that the shifting colours there glowed and burned. From their unseen niche the musicians struck up, a slow picking of the strings at first, the drum a low but complex patter.
Grief in Chains moved, and she took the sunlight with her. It sparkled on her skin and ghosted like mist in the air behind her. And she began to dance.
Thalric maintained his lack of interest until the music changed tempo, the pace quickening bar after bar until she was spinning and leaping across from sunbeam to sunbeam. Then she was in the air, the iridescent shimmer of her Art-wings unfolding about her, and his breath caught despite himself.
She had always been chained before, so the slavers had not seen half of what she could do. With the music soaring and skittering all around them, the plucked notes becoming hard as glass, the drum like a dozen busy feet, she danced and spun, coasting in space and swooping at the pillars’ tops. She seemed to embrace the very air, to mime love to it, and Thalric had never seen the like before. Even he, for the moments of that airborne ballet, even he was touched.
Then she was in bowed obeisance again, and the music had struck its final moment, and Thalric shook off, somewhat irritably, the net that had been on him. Looking at his fellows, though, he saw a wide-eyed rapture, and nowhere more so than on Ulther’s face. What had he paid, and what had he done, to catch this jewel? More, what would he have to do to keep her from his fellows?
A spark of insight came to Thalric then, and it cut him deeply, but it was the answer to a question he had not known to ask.
Memorable. He watched the Butterfly girl as they chained her again, studying her suddenly with renewed interest.
It was rare for Thalric to be able to mix business with pleasure but, still, he took his pleasure first, moving quick-eningly atop the Wasp-kinden slave-girl, sourly aware that her responses were born of a need to appear willing, and that the pleasure, such as it was, was all his. Even this pleasure was a distant thing to him, a need that he could watch and analyse even as it was being fulfilled. As he reached his peak Thalric was thinking wryly of the flesh-pots of Helleron, whose varied depravity he would now miss, and that this was the first time in some years that he had lain with one of his own kinden.
She went to leave then, sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to him, gathering up her clothes. When he touched her arm, she would not look at him – did not, in fact, until he told her, ‘Stay.’
‘I should be returning. They’ll ask—’
‘It wasn’t a request.’
And that got her attention. When she looked at him there was something left, after all, of the Empire in her face: a pride that had been battered but not quite broken down. She still possessed internal walls that her servitude had not breached.
‘What’s your name, woman?’ he asked, sitting up. He saw her eyes flick from his face to the jagged scar that flowered beneath his right collarbone.
‘Hreya,’ she said quietly. ‘They say you’re with the Rekef.’
‘Let them say what they want.’ As Ulther had started him off on that road, it was only to be expected that rumour here would be rife. ‘How did you come to this, Hreya?’
Her expression suggested that such questions would have been better asked before, but he lived his life to maxims of efficiency, in this as all else. At last she revealed, ‘My father gambled. You know the laws, sir.’
They were harsh laws, carried over by the Empire from the days when there were nothing but three score squabbling hill tribes to call themselves the Wasp people. Women were property – of either father or husband – and as such they were prey for creditors, to be sold into marriage or into slavery. Thalric would never think to speak against imperial law, of course, but it was still a tradition he could have done without. The mothers of the Wasp-kinden deserved better, he thought. They might be women, but they were still of the race. They shared in the Empire’s destiny.
‘How many of you does Ulther keep to hand?’ he asked.
‘Almost thirty, I think, at last count,’ she told him. ‘For the use of himself and his guests.’
‘Any locals?’
‘Not yet, sir. Sir, I’m cold.’
The utter indignity of her having to seek his permission to clothe herself, and the fact that she said the words with a straight back, with the shame sloughing off her, touched him. ‘Dress, by all means. I just want to talk a little. About the governor, if you will?’
As she gathered her gown to her she gave him a hooded look, and he added, ‘None of this will reach him.’
‘You’re his friend, sir. From long ago.’
‘And I’m interested in him as he is now. You can speak freely about him to me. Unless you’d rather I tell him you disappointed me.’
Her expression hardened. ‘And if I tell him you were asking questions, sir?’
He smiled, because she had so very little but she was willing to make use of it. ‘Perhaps I want him to know. Although he may not thank you.’ He saw from her reaction that he was right. Ulther would not welcome his body slaves playing spy for him unless he had asked them to. ‘Tell me about his guests, then.’
That was safer ground. ‘They are officers, mostly, and merchants of the Consortium, sir. He entertains them.’
‘Oltan and Rauth, that lot. Quartermaster and intelligencer, aren’t they?’
‘So they say.’ He had been listening for that, the slight scorn in her voice.
‘You are a good subject of the Empire, are you not?’ he said softly.
‘I am a slave.’
‘But you know what serves the Empire and what does not, even so,’ he pressed. ‘So tell me, not what they say, but what you say.’ He would have offered her money, perhaps, but slaves had no right to possess money. She could never spend it without raising suspicion. He would have to find a harder currency. ‘Speak to me honestly and openly, and I will do what I can for you. This I promise.’
Her look revealed not one grain of trust at first, but he let her read his face, his eyes. She was desperate, although she herself had not known it
until now. He had opened the slightest portal into the darkness where her life had gone. What choice did she have?
Salma’s smile was wan and waning. The cell was dark, night creeping in through the high grille on one wall, but Che could still see his smile, as though through a sheet of dusky glass.
‘It’s that girl, isn’t it?’ she said, knowing that the words made her sound petty. ‘I don’t see . . . I mean, you’ve only known her for a few days, barely spoken to her.’
‘Ah, but it’s the gaps between the words that you can fall into,’ he said. ‘My people traditionally say that, but I never really appreciated it before. Perhaps it’s just because she’s a reminder of home.’
‘She is?’
‘The Butterfly-kinden . . . it’s difficult to explain. Enclaves of them live within the bounds of the Commonweal, but they’re not really a part of our world.’ They came and went as they pleased, he recalled. He had never even seen one close to before, there were so few of them. They wanted for little, did not trade or toil. They had no need to. From the moment they were weaned from their mother’s milk the sun and their Art were enough to sustain them. They lived to dance, to sing and rejoice. They were special, life’s own chosen, and in the Commonweal they were respected. They went out into the world to perform, and for the love of performing, and they were gifted with fabrics and gems and applause. If they lived also beyond the Commonweal’s borders, he had not known it.
Except that those borders had changed. Some band of Butterfly-kinden somewhere must have greeted the dawn only to discover they were under the Empire’s shadow now.
He had heard others of his race speak about their fascinating beauty, their ethereal charms, but he had never credited it. Now he found his mind drawn back and back again to Grief in Chains. It was true she was new to him, so briefly arrived in his life, but as he sat here in darkness now, he felt the loss of her colours.
She had, he was beginning to realize, done something to him, touched him in some way. She had been trapped in chains, a slave. He had reached out to her. That had been consent enough for her to put her mark on him.
And Che was jealous, which amused him. His smile regained some of its life then, and Che remarked, ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’
‘Not at all,’ he said insincerely. ‘You’re right: we hardly spoke.’ But they had spoken. Whilst Che had dozed, as only a Beetle could in that thundering machine, Salma and Grief had sat close together. She had tried to paint her home for him but, depicted in her colours, he could not place it. Nowhere in his Commonweal was as bright as that. Afterwards, he had told her about himself: his family and his Kin-obligate, and his service to Stenwold.
He had promised that he would help her if he could, when he could not even help himself. He had somehow the feeling that this was an oath the universe would exact on him to fulfil. His people believed in oaths just like the Mantis-kinden, with whom they shared many traditions. Oaths were magic.
There was a rattle at the door, and he heard Che start up suddenly. The light that came in was cold lamplight, and two soldiers were silhouetted against it.
‘You,’ said one, pointing at Che. ‘Here, now.’
They took her to a room which had been some man’s study once. There was a large window shuttered on the east wall, and there were bare shelves and patches on the walls where tapestries had hung. Any original finery had been pirated for other rooms until the one adornment left to it was an ornate table. Behind the table stood Thalric, dressed only in a long tunic, with a knife but no sword at his belt. Her brief moment of hope died as she recalled that the Wasp-kinden never went unarmed, that their hands alone were weapons.
‘Leave us,’ he directed, even as the guards thrust her within. They backed out and closed the door on her. Thalric remained standing, arms folded, and he eyed her vacantly for a moment, in her grimy and haggard state. There seemed something different about him, some new tension or edge. He was clearly in the hold of some crisis that had little to do with her.
‘What do you want from me?’ she said, trying to find some courage in herself. Her voice quavered. It had been a long journey, a long time spent in the dark cell. She was hungry and tired and frustrated, not in the mood for this encounter, not remotely ready. She had an uneasy feeling, even then, that she did not have the emotional reserves necessary to deal with him – nor he with her. Still, he did not seem to register her defiance.
‘I’m here to listen to you,’ he said shortly.
‘Couldn’t sleep then? Do you want me to tell you a story?’ It was defiance born of a lack of any hope. Some part of her wanted it all over. She heard herself say the mocking words and braced herself, but he did not rise to them. He seemed curiously distracted, his mind partly elsewhere.
‘A story? Quite,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me I haven’t given you enough time to prepare.’ He sounded annoyed, as though she had summoned him here inconveniently in the middle of the night.
She folded her own arms, unconsciously mimicking his stance. ‘I have nothing to say. I’ve already told you, I won’t betray my friends.’
‘On the contrary, you have a great deal to say. Let’s start with Stenwold Maker’s plans, for example.’ Now he was finally rising to her words, but his ire was fuelled from something within.
What’s eating at you, Captain?
‘He never told me any of them,’ she said. ‘For this very reason, I suspect. He didn’t tell any of us and I wasn’t even supposed to be leaving Collegium. If your thugs hadn’t burst into our house that night I’d still be there.’ Still be whining about not going, too, I suppose. Oh, what I didn’t know, back then.
‘What a loss that would be. And your companions, those that are still free – the Spider wench and the half-breed – you have a great deal to say about them, I imagine.’ He was leaning forward against the table, and she matched him across it, almost nose to nose. She had been a penned-up slave all day and she was not in the mood, whereas he was off balance already, and suddenly she found herself pushing.
‘You’ve found out as much as I could tell you,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you have agents at the College reporting back to you?’
‘Listen, girl, this is your one remaining chance to exercise your own free will in this business. Tell me what you know.’
‘What I know? I know some history, Captain, and applied mechanics, a little medicine and a bit of nature lore. I have nothing else to tell you.’ She could sense the coiled spring of his temper.
‘Miss Maker—’
‘What? I know they’re my friends, and they would help me if they could, and I hope they’re all right, and I’m glad you haven’t caught them because they’re my friends, and that’s how it is between friends. I care for them. I hope they care for me. That’s friendship.’
Some barb, some unknowing dart in her speech made him flinch as though she had drawn blood ‘Don’t play games with me, girl,’ he warned her. In a detached way she could see the anger rising in him was not anger focused on her, but had been in place before she was even brought in front of him. The entire conversation was taking second place to some other struggle in his mind. He had locked her up, then had her dragged here before him, and he wasn’t even paying proper attention save when some chance word got in the way of his thoughts.
‘Games? Who’s playing games? What’s this then, if not a game of yours?’ she got out. ‘I’m your prisoner. Am I supposed to forget that and just give you my life story? If anyone’s playing games it’s you, Captain. Your whole life must consist of them.’ She was stammering a little, choking on her own boldness. Something she had just said had touched a nerve, made him pause to think. He stared at her with almost desperate loathing.
She had taken enough. She could not stop herself. ‘What’s the matter, Captain?’ she asked, not quite believing that he was letting her get away with it. ‘Maybe you should tell me about it. Maybe that would help, because I have nothing to tell you.’
‘Now is a poor time to di
scover rebellion,’ he said, his voice taut.
‘Better now than not at all, I think—’
A muscle twitched in his face, and the table exploded. She was flung backwards across the room in a shower of wood shards, striking the wall hard enough to leave her breathless. She saw him stride towards her over the wreckage. The palms of his hands were black with soot, wispy with wood-smoke.
‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he said, each word through clenched teeth.
‘You can’t blame me,’ she said, gasping, and knew he understood her but did not care.
‘And if I chose to take it out on you, who would stop me?’ he said. He was standing over her now, and his hands were still smoking.
‘What use would . . . what good would killing me do for your Empire?’ She had never been really afraid of him – not until now. He had spoken to her previously, and he had been civilized. Now that civility was gone from him. She peered into his Wasp soul with all its hard edges and hungry fires.
His eyes were so wide she could almost see his torment as a living thing. Sparks crackled across his fingers and she hid her face from them.
‘The Empire needs a happy Thalric more than an unhappy Thalric,’ he grated, each word snapped out with all the control he could muster. ‘And right now I think it might make me happier to make a corpse of a Beetle maid who will not talk.’
But he did not and, after a pause, she cautiously looked up at him. His face was still stern, remorseless, and there was no humour there when he said, ‘It is the scourge of my people, Miss Maker, this temper of ours. I have a stronger rein on it than most, but do not presume.’
With shaking hands she reached up, plucked a three-inch-long splinter from her hair. Her heart was still stuttering: he had been so close, was still so close to killing her. ‘Captain Thalric—’ She heard her voice shaking and hated herself for it, hated herself more for the next word. ‘Please listen to me. I don’t know anything you want to know. I don’t know Stenwold’s plans, or where he is now, or what he wants. I don’t know anything that can help you. Can’t you . . .’ She got a hold on herself before she actually said it.
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