‘How long has the Empire been here?’ the helm enquired.
‘Oh, about a couple of days longer than the Lowlanders. And yes, I know, obvious conclusions: one of them’s here to watch the other. Or both of them are.’
His superior nodded. ‘And the Lowlander ambassador is … who I suspected?’
‘She is, yes.’
‘So.’ There was a fierce edge to this single word that made Corcoran guess that Che Maker was in for a complicated future. ‘Where have they put her?’
‘The old embassies. They’ve reopened them.’
‘Make sure you have people watching her constantly. Know where she goes, who she meets.’ The gauntleted hands clenched.
‘Of course, sir.’ And why’s that then? But it was not Corcoran’s place to ask questions of this man.
‘And now I think we have our welcoming committee.’
Corcoran turned to see a full score of Khanaphir guardsmen hurriedly pushing their way through the crowds towards the docks. Although not caparisoned in the gilded splendour of the Royal Guard, they had the great form of Amnon striding at their head. They halted and formed up at a respectful distance as the two groups of armed men watched each other cautiously. Corcoran, caught in the middle, began to feel exposed.
‘Now then, who have we here?’ boomed Amnon as he stepped forward. When he came to stand before Corcoran’s master he seemed quite oblivious of the spear-tipped ranks poised ready to close on him. ‘Iron Glove, then? More of you? We’re a little taken aback, my good friends, since we were not expecting such numbers. Our hospitality may not stretch to it.’
‘We don’t need much,’ replied the Iron Glove leader, as he tilted his helm back, revealing a tan-brown face with that slight mismatching of feature that spoke of mixed blood.
‘You must think our streets very dangerous, to come in such numbers,’ Amnon murmured. His countenance was all good humour, but Corcoran could sense his displeasure, ready to make a fight of this if the Iron Glove’s answers did not satisfy him.
I only hope they read everything I wrote to them about how to deal with the Khanaphir, he thought. Corcoran wanted to edge away, to slip out of that invisible line of tension strung between the city guard and the mercenary newcomers, but he had an image to maintain. The Iron Glove did not show fear.
‘The world’s not safe. Without these men I’d not have arrived at all,’ the Iron Glove leader replied. ‘Indeed, some pirates saw our little trading coaster here and marked it as an easy prize.’
Amnon nodded. ‘And did you outrun them …?’
‘They discovered their mistake.’
‘I hate pirates.’ Amnon’s face split in a grin. ‘Those that dare strike near the mouth of the Jamail are the rightful prey of my ships. I am glad to hear you sent them to the bottom.’
‘Not at all. I put men on their vessel and had them sail her back to Porta Rabi. We of the Iron Glove are well known as traders, and wealthy ones. We become targets, by land or sea. We show them in exchange that we who sell war can use what we trade in. That way they will soon realize that we always fight, and that any attacks will cost them more than they could ever gain from us.’ He glanced back at his followers, still standing at the ready. ‘So there you have the reason for this force. As for my men, they can lodge here on the ship, or wherever you wish in the city.’
‘I will have rooms prepared at your factora,’ Amnon decided. He had been nodding with approval throughout the man’s speech, and with these words the tension eased, his guards standing down with a tiny shuffle of feet. ‘Well then, allow me to welcome you to our city. I am Amnon, First Soldier among the Royal Guard.’
The Iron Glove commander threw a brief glance at Corcoran for confirmation, before announcing, ‘Ah, so we have a gift for you, I believe.’
Amnon nodded. ‘That is no surprise to me, after all the measuring and prying that your man here has done.’
‘It may surprise you yet,’ the Iron Glove man remarked. ‘I am glad to be here in your city.’ He thrust forward his armoured hand and clasped Amnon’s larger one. ‘My name is Totho, once of Collegium. I think you have some of my kin here.’
‘Apparently there’s going to be a hunt of some kind,’ Manny reported. The other Collegiates looked up from their breakfast in mild interest. ‘Their big fellow, Amnon, came round yesterday while you were all out,’ he went on. ‘We’re all invited. In fact it’s in our honour. I, for one, am looking forward to it.’
‘Are you sure you’re feeling well?’ Berjek asked him. ‘This hunt, presumably it will involve some manner of exertion – running around or that kind of thing. Not your favourite pastime at all, I would have thought.’
‘Very funny.’ The fat man gave him a sour look. ‘I am a natural historian and a cartographer, do not forget. Neither of which I can do much about while sitting idly here in this city. I want to go out and make a few sketches, and this hunt sounds like the best chance I’ll get – anyway, it’s on the river and so all I’ll have to do is recline in a boat while some local beauty fans me with a frond or something.’
‘Some local bald beauty,’ Berjek pointed out.
Manny’s expression remained supremely unconcerned. ‘I happen to find that quite attractive.’
‘Are you planning to deflower the entire female population of Khanaphes before we’re done here?’ Praeda asked testily.
‘They don’t object.’
‘They’ve probably been warned that their families will be executed if they don’t indulge the important foreigners,’ she said. ‘That’s the only way I can account for it.’
‘Trallo, what sort of hunt is this likely to be?’ Berjek turned to the Fly. ‘Dangerous?’
‘Could be, if you get too close,’ Trallo replied. He had been idle recently, his work in Khanaphes already done, and Che suspected he might soon ask for his pay and take his leave. ‘They usually put the spectators out in mid-river where they can watch safely, while the real business goes on in the shallows or on the shore. Of course, they’ll respect you all the more if you ask to take part.’
Petri Coggen appeared just then, bleary-eyed. Che studied her with a matching expression. Her own dreams had been bad again, too, but Che remembered only fragments. When she awoke the ghost was boiling in the air beside her bed and, in conjunction with her latest nightmare, she had not been able to suppress a scream. Its seething frustration was palpable: she could feel its thoughts, and they were all contempt and rage at being trapped, and all directed at her, for keeping it so.
‘I’m sorry!’ she had cried out to it. ‘Please, tell me what to do!’
But instantly it had been gone, just as Trallo had burst in, half-dressed and with a crossbow in his hands.
I can’t take much more of this, she thought. This city that had promised so much had betrayed her, and she was falling apart.
Praeda and Berjek were heading out into the city again. Che was still not quite sure what they were looking for, and she guessed that neither were they. Once they were out of the door, Manny laughed vaguely. ‘She might come over all Mistress Detached, but I know something she doesn’t. Remember that party at the, what’s the place called?’
‘The Scriptora,’ Che supplied.
‘Right. Their man Amnon, he had some interesting questions to ask me.’
At the mention of the name, Petri shuddered, but Manny was too concerned with his story to notice.
‘He was asking me, you see, whether our Praeda Rakespear had a man back home.’ He smirked. ‘I think he thought that she and I might be … you know, but when he found out we weren’t, he was asking if there was anyone else. I think our big dumb brute has taken a liking to the Cold One.’
‘And you wouldn’t have encouraged him in that at all?’ Trallo tried to sound stern, but could not hide his grin.
‘Perish the thought.’ Manny winked.
Tiring of this conversation, Che caught Petri’s eye and jerked her head towards the next room.
Out of
earshot of the others, she said firmly, ‘Today, Petri.’ It had been several days since she had first made her request, and she knew that Petri was trying to put her off.
‘I’m really not—’
‘Today,’ Che repeated quietly. She sat down on a canvas-covered stool. ‘You are not the only one of us this city is destroying.’
‘You don’t understand.’ Petri actually knelt before her. ‘This thing, it is banned by the Masters … the Ministers, I mean. It is illegal. What would they think if they found you …? They call the very practice “the Profanity”.’
In Che’s mind the ghost howled again, and Achaeos’s blank eyes held only hatred. She could feel her hands shaking, ever so slightly. I will break, she decided, if I cannot claw some release from this city. ‘I don’t care,’ she told Petri. ‘Let that be my worry.’ The words tasted foul in her mouth.
‘But the people … you must see, the people who practise Profanity, they are criminals, outlaws, outcasts. If you venture among them, they might just cut your throat.’
‘I am looking for mystics, whatever shabby oracles and seers this place can throw up,’ Che said stubbornly, ‘not for some den of murderers.’
‘They take their mysticism very seriously here. If the guard caught them, they would be executed. It is … a vice, an illegal pleasure. Fir, they call it.’
‘Fear?’
‘Fir,’ Petri pronounced it more carefully. ‘But it is not like taking some Spiderlands drug, or exotic women, or that kind of vice. There is … a whole under-society based around it, and they are mad, unpredictable. They might kill you on the spot – you can never tell. Kadro, he was good with such people, but he still didn’t like to go looking for the Fir-eaters.’
Che clenched her fists in frustration. She felt as though she was already experiencing withdrawal from some drug, cut off from a normality that she had breathed and eaten and slept with for twenty years. I cannot be doing what I am now doing. I am Cheerwell Maker, scholar of the Great College, citizen of Collegium, niece of Master Stenwold Maker. I am no criminal. Give me some other way to turn!
‘But they are mystics, or at least they talk like mystics do, about the past, and … impossible things,’ Petri continued hoarsely. ‘I do not know who else there is.’
‘Then take me to them,’ Che demanded, before she could change her mind.
*
The man Petri found was a starved-looking Khanaphir. He was bare-chested and Che could see each of his ribs distinctly beneath that taut skin. It was clear that sustenance came second to some greater love in his life.
They met him at an ‘open house’ near the docks, meaning a place where the locals offered drink and other services to foreign mariners, so that they would not be tempted to venture any further into the city. The place was crowded, squalid, the outer shell of an older building fitted out with as many benches and tables as possible. Solarnese and Dragonfly and Spider-kinden sat shoulder to shoulder, and argued and drank and brawled.
The lean man hunched forward towards the two Beetle women. His eyes were cavernous, hollowed. ‘I hear you seek something this place here cannot provide,’ he said. Che had to strain to catch the words.
Petri glanced nervously at Che and then nodded, her hands clutched each other anxiously on the tabletop. ‘Something special,’ she explained. ‘I know … someone I know said you could find it for us.’
There was a bleak cynicism in the thin man’s eyes. ‘Be careful what you seek. The Profanity is not for all palates. It is not for foreigners.’
‘Do not presume to know who I am,’ Che interrupted. The words came from within her, yet no conscious thought had formed them. As she snapped them out, she found herself pincering the man’s bony wrist with her fingers. His recoiling twitch whiplashed down his long arm, but her grip held tight.
‘What do you want?’ He was afraid now, not of them but of something else, something she could not see.
‘You know what I want.’ Che’s heart was racing. She felt as though she was hurtling downhill, and sometimes she was in control and sometimes she was just falling forwards. Something had come over her, some sharp inspiration. Could that be Achaeos’s ghost, speaking through her?
The lean man bit his lip, staring at her. ‘This other … no, but you …Who are you? Where do you come from?’
‘I’ve come a long way.’ Che finally released him, saw the shadow of her grasp on his skin, that he rubbed at resentfully. He would no longer look at either of them.
‘If you want, then you shall have. But do not complain, afterwards, that it was not what you sought.’
‘Just take me there,’ Che said. ‘Petri, you can go. You don’t have to come with me.’
‘But … you can’t just go off alone with him,’ Petri protested. She dragged Che away from the table, out of the man’s earshot. ‘He’ll kill you,’ she insisted.
‘He might.’ Che’s hand moved to her sword, buckled on now that politeness was no issue. ‘What else can I do?’
‘No, Che!’ Petri hissed, casting the thin man a venomous look – as though she herself had not been the one who had led Che here.
‘Will you come with me, then?’
‘With him? Into the Marsh Alcaia again?’ Petri bared her teeth in desperation. ‘Not again … don’t make me …’
Someone right beside them rapped on a table with something hard, a dagger hilt. Both of them turned to see a Fly-kinden man, his face half hidden beneath a broad-brimmed hat. The neat beard gave him away and Che felt her stomach lurch at the thought of discovery.
‘Trallo,’ she gasped.
He tilted up the brim of the hat and gave her a broad smile. ‘I reckoned you were up to something foolish,’ he said. ‘Thankfully you have people interested in keeping you safe, so I decided to keep an eye on you.’
‘Trallo, this isn’t your business now.’
He took a long breath, a tiny spot of calm in the rowdy open house. The lean man still watched them, clutching at the edge of his table.
‘You’re about to do something really unwise, I can tell that. You’re about to go somewhere very dangerous.’
‘It’s my decision.’
Trallo glanced from Che to the shaking Petri, and back. ‘Fine, I’ll come with you. That’s my decision.’
Che was caught in mid-protest, suddenly thinking, Was that not what I wanted? Trallo would surely be of more use than poor Petri, and Petri just as surely would not come willingly. ‘Do you know … You know Khanaphes. You should know what we’re about before you make such an offer.’
Trallo shrugged. ‘Like I said, our friends have asked me to ensure you’re safe. They’re worried about you.’
Che thought of Berjek and the rest, and would not have believed that of them, but here the Fly was, all the same.
She leant close to him. ‘We are going to the Fir-eaters. You’ve heard of them?’
‘Heard of, but never met.’ He made a face. ‘Tell your hungry friend there to pack his bags, then. Bella Petri, you get yourself back to the embassy – and not a word of this to anyone, you understand?’
Petri nodded gratefully and, before anyone could retract the offer, she was hurrying for the door.
‘I’m grateful for this, Trallo,’ Che said.
The Fly spread his hands. ‘What are friends for?’
And she was happy enough with that answer not to notice the signal he gave, as they left the open house.
Eighteen
There had been Scorpions keeping pace with them for at least three days, and Hrathen guessed probably a while longer. Since that morning they had let themselves be silhouetted against the barren skyline. On foot, or seated on their beasts, with spears held high, they had stared at the odd caravan but made no move against it.
Why would they, Hrathen thought wryly, when we are so obligingly going where they want us to go? Imperial mapmakers had not made much inroad into the Nem. It was a wasteland of stones and dust, of coarse ridges of bloody-minded grass th
at cut the skin like knives, and of ruins. Here and there some fault in the rock beneath opened narrow rootspace with access to underground water, nourishing stark, barrel-trunked trees with fleshy leaves shaped like the sort of arrowheads the Empire used to pierce strong mail. The going was uneven, the dusty terrain rising and falling with the stony bones of the land beneath. Sometimes those bones speared through into crags and juts of red-black rock that the coarse wind had rounded and bowed.
The Imperial scouts, mostly staying with the dubious safety of the Slave Corps, had nevertheless ventured far enough to pinpoint a Scorpion-kinden camp, and it was this tenuous landmark that Hrathen had set his compass by. Overall, it was Brugan’s plan but Hrathen’s details. Hrathen found he liked this mission, as Brugan had known he would, and in liking it, he would remain faithful to it. Until it suits me otherwise. Such was the constant clash of his mixed blood: the Wasp crying, Serve yourself by serving the Empire, while the Scorpion roared out, Do what you will.
The Scorpions of the Nem were not so dependent on outside trading to make their living as the Dryclaw tribes Hrathen had known, but still, a caravan of this size walking obediently towards one of their camps had attracted a lot of interest: three heavily laden automotives grinding their monotonous way over the desert ground, and each of them with two draught beetles plodding meekly in traces before them, not labouring as yet but ready to haul the wagons if they broke down or ran out of fuel. Hrathen had asked for a score of the Slave Corps’s most intrepid, and Brugan had not stinted on obliging him. They were like old friends, to him, for he knew them for men who adulterated Imperial writ with their own self-interest, willing to go further and risk more for the sake of their profits and their pleasures. Proceeding alongside them were a dozen who wore the armour of the Light Airborne, but who mostly kept to themselves with a quiet discipline. Hrathen had marked these as Rekef agents, and guessed that they would be keeping a close eye on him.
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