Something cold touched his lips, and he twisted his head violently, ringing his skull with agony. The woman’s voice said sharply, ‘Stop that. It is water only.’
He cautiously turned back to press his mouth against the lip of a cup. The water it contained was so startlingly cold that he felt there must be ice in it. A moment later a damp cloth was put to his forehead.
He forced himself to look properly, to make the vague shapes resolve themselves. The woman who had spoken was young, he saw, and dark-skinned. At first he assumed she was a Beetle, but her face was too flat, her frame too compact. Then he recalled the slave-artificers and recognized her as of the same kinden.
‘Where am I?’ he finally rasped, and found the ache in his head was joined by another inside his cheek. His mouth tasted rusty with dried blood, so he must have bitten himself in the struggle.
He saw the woman turn and glance at someone behind her, who had not, in all this time, moved or spoken. Merely the thought sent a shiver through him, and then she had stepped aside, and someone else was now standing beside the strange chair. Totho turned his head as far as the pain would allow, and saw a metal-gauntleted hand, exquisitely worked.
The newcomer’s voice was quiet and sly, slightly mocking. ‘In your position, young man, I would not waste my time with unnecessary questions. What is your name, young one?’
He decided he was not going to answer, and then the gauntlet shifted with a slight scraping of metal and he said quickly, ‘Totho. They called me Totho.’
‘A Fly-kinden name.’ The man sounded amused. ‘You must have been brought up in . . . Collegium, I would guess? Well then, my own name is Dariandrephos, but the boorish Wasps call me Drephos. Or “the Colonel-Auxillian”, of course.’
‘Colonel . . . ?’ Totho wrestled with the term.
‘In fact I am the only Colonel-Auxillian in the Empire. I know that because they invented the rank solely for my benefit. Perhaps one day they will have to make me General-Auxillian, and then perhaps, what? Emperor-Auxillian. That would be amusing. Where were you trained?’
Totho shut his eyes and said nothing.
‘Do you know why you are here – rather than with the other prisoners? Perhaps you do not. We captured three of you, and the other two will be questioned as the Wasps question, as far as their physical capabilities permit. This, as you should have surmised, is not questioning. This is merely a friendly conversation, Totho.’
Still Totho said nothing, and his interrogator clicked his tongue in annoyance. Totho waited for a blow, but instead there was a tugging at his wrists, and then his bonds were loosened. He opened his eyes to see the girl retreating from him again.
‘Of course, you require some token of my good will,’ said Drephos.
Finally Totho was able to twist around to look at him. He saw none of the man’s flesh. The robe and cowl made a tall spectre of him. Only that gauntlet emerged from the folds of black and yellow cloth.
‘What is going on?’ Totho demanded. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘You are here because of this.’ The gauntlet dipped into Drephos’s robe and came out again with a strangely hesitant precision that made Totho wonder whether the hand inside had been injured or burned. On its reappearance it was gripping a small mechanism that he knew only too well.
‘And this.’ Drephos’s other hand, dark-gloved but bare of metal, appeared briefly to hang a long strip of pocketed leather on the arm of the metal chair. It was Totho’s tool-strip, and the device brandished before his face was one of his air batteries, his little pet project he had never been able to finish.
‘It is remarkable how much one can learn from the contents of a man’s pack,’ Drephos continued. ‘You have clearly been trained as an artificer, but I could have told that from the calluses of your hands. You were trained in Collegium then? In the Great College?’
Numbly, Totho nodded.
‘I would have given a great deal for that privilege.’
‘You’re an artificer?’ Totho seized on that statement. It seemed to offer him some small chance of respite.
Drephos laughed hollowly. ‘I am perhaps, though I say it myself, the most skilled artificer you will ever meet. The only reason I qualify that with “perhaps” is your own tutelage. I am painfully aware that, myself excluded, the Empire is somewhat young in the game of artifice: three generations from barbarism whilst you Lowlanders have a tradition that goes back centuries. Still, one must work with the tools one has.’
‘But the Empire must have artificers. Wasp artificers?’ Totho said. ‘I can’t be so special.’
‘But you are, because I do not want to rely on Wasp artificers. They are either dull men who have learned their mechanics by rote, or they waste what intellect they have in politics and one-upmanship and care nothing for the science itself. No, my people, my journeymen, are chosen from other sources. Unless the man be an outcast, I will not have a Wasp in my workshops.’
‘You want me to—?’
‘I am interested in you, Totho. I have never had the honour of a Great College student working for me.’
‘I will never work for the Empire!’ Totho snapped, sitting halfway up, then falling back, his head still clamouring.
‘I have a case to make.’ Drephos sounded amused.
‘I know the Empire. I know how they look on other races, even if they aren’t halfbreeds!’ Totho said through his teeth.
‘And what if they are?’ There was such dry humour in the man’s voice that Totho propped himself up on one elbow to see what was so funny.
Drephos raised his hands, one cased in metal and one without, and slipped his cowl back. The face he revealed was mottled and blotchy with grey, and his eyes had no irises. There were many grades of halfbreed, Totho already knew. A few like Tynisa were just like one parent or the other, and some others managed to combine their heritage into something exotic and attractive. Most were like Totho himself, stamped with an intermingling of bloods that others saw, and then judged them by. Drephos, though, was of those few who seemed actively twisted by their inheritance. His features were lean and ascetic but subtly wrong in their proportions. Even when he smiled the effect was unpleasantly skewed.
‘I am aware, young man, that I will win no prizes for my beauty, but believe that I, therefore, judge no man on his face or blood,’ he said.
‘Drephos,’ Totho said softly. ‘And that other name, the long one. Moth-kinden names?’
‘My mother was left to name me. My father, unknown and unmourned, bestowed on her only so much of his time as it took to rape her. Wasp soldiers are not known for their benevolence towards prisoners or slaves. I suppose few soldiers are.’
‘But you said you were an artificer?’
The lopsided smile grew wider than seemed comfortable. ‘Remarkable, is it not? And yet something from my father’s seed has communicated to me all the workings of the world of metal, for here I am, so much of an artificer that they turn their hierarchy inside out to accommodate me. Without me the walls of Tark would still be whole, utterly unbreached. Yet my mother’s people sit in their caves and draw pictures on the wall, and pretend they are still great.’
Totho sank back into the chair. There was a feeling snagged deep inside him, because he was now interested. This maverick artificer, who seemed to have carved out some high station even amidst the Wasp Empire, had caught his imagination.
‘Was it your idea,’ Drephos asked softly, ‘to destroy my airships?’
And there was a leading question, and more what Totho had been expecting. It would be better, he thought, to return to familiar ground. ‘It was.’ He steeled himself.
‘Don’t be shy of it,’ Drephos said. ‘It was a well-planned raid. I’d guessed that the Ant-kinden hadn’t considered it. I have dealt with them before and there is not a grain of intuition in their entire race. But you saw the threat and acted, even as I myself saw our vulnerability. That is why I had two whole wings of soldiers on standby, to rush to the airsh
ips the very moment anything disturbed the camp. And just as well I did.’
So that was it: the final nail in the coffin for Totho’s desperate plan. He recalled in his mind a brief swirl of images, the fighting, the fury. A sudden lurch took him, and he tried to spring out of the chair. Even before the young woman had moved to restrain him, he was already toppling, the pain in his head making it impossible to stand. Her arms grappled his body, surprisingly strong, hauled him up and sat on him the edge of the chair.
‘Prisoners . . .’ Totho muttered
‘Yes?’ Even with his eyes closed he could hear Drephos moving near.
‘You said you had taken prisoners. Other prisoners.’
‘Two to be precise, although one of them may not recover enough to be questioned.’
‘Was there . . . ?’ He squinted up at the man. ‘Was there a Dragonfly-kinden man? He would have had—’
‘I know the Commonwealers, the Dragonflies,’ Drephos confirmed. ‘After all, the Twelve-Year War was the testing ground for some of my best inventions. I’m sorry, though, but the other prisoners are just Ant-kinden. If there was a Dragonfly last night, he has not been taken alive, nor did any escape, to our knowledge. I am afraid it seems most likely he is amongst the fallen.’
Eighteen
General Maxin took a last moment to understand his reports. They were a secret of his success, these reports. He had very able slaves whose sole task was to compile the wealth of information the Rekef Inlander brought, so he could then look through these few scrolls and read in them all he needed to know. Details could come later. Details he would ask for. For now he had his picture, his mental sketch of who was plotting, who was falling, who was on the rise or on the take.
And his information was not just fodder for the Emperor’s ears, either. Maxin had his own schemes. The Rekef was a young organization, created in the very closing years of the first Emperor’s reign by the man whose name the spies now bore. The structure and hierarchy had evolved over the next twenty years but at some levels it was still changing. Maxin had his own plans for it.
There were three generals of the Rekef, the idea being that each controlled his own particular section of the Empire, spoke to the others and reported to the Emperor. In practice, of course, those men who were ambitious enough to become generals in the Rekef did not suffer the interference of their peers.
And Maxin himself was winning. That was all he cared about. He was the man who sat amongst the Emperor’s advisers. General Brugen was chasing shadows and savages around the East-Empire amidst famine and bureaucracy and the stubbornness of the slave races. General Reiner was wrestling with the Lowlands. For the moment, Maxin was winning and he intended to keep it that way.
Of course there had been setbacks. Brugen was a conscientious man with more small troubles than his staff could conveniently cope with, so Maxin did not fear him. General Reiner was another matter, however. Only recently a man whom Maxin had raised to the governorship of a city, a man well placed for Maxin’s plans, had been disposed of by Reiner. The city, its Rekef agents and its considerable wealth, had then been put in the hands of Reiner’s shadow, the execrable Colonel Latvoc.
It had been a challenge to Maxin’s primacy, of course, but Maxin enjoyed challenges – as long as he won in the end.
He would win in the end. He had the Emperor ready to love him like a brother . . . Or perhaps not like a brother. After all, Maxin had overseen the murder of all the Emperor’s siblings bar one, and dealt with several other rivals at the same time. Nevertheless he had now presented the Emperor with perhaps the one gift all his Empire could not give him. It would be leverage enough, Maxin decided, to call for a major restructuring in the Rekef, and then Reiner and Brugen would understand, however briefly, that any army could only have one general.
He rolled up the scrolls and stowed them in the hidden compartment of his desk, then left to meet the Emperor.
They had moved the slave to a better cell, one with tapestries and carpets, some Grasshopper carvings for ornament, and no natural light. Uctebri had complained at the brightness of the gaslamps, though, and now oil lanterns hung randomly from the ceiling about his chambers, making them look more squalid than ever.
Still, he came to greet them at the first call of his name and Maxin knew they had been feeding him well enough. This scrawny creature seemed to have a remarkable appetite: it was not clear precisely where so much blood could go.
When the prisoner had presented himself, Alvdan circled him cautiously. Maxin knew the difficulties here were ones of belief. What the wretched old Uctebri had proposed was impossible, quite impossible, as any rational mind well knew. The thing the old Mosquito promised, the golden, impossible dream of sorcerers and ancient kings, belonged in the forgotten folk tales of slaves. When Uctebri spoke of it, though, it was hard not to remember that his very race was supposed to be extinct, to be entirely mythical. While he rasped the words, with his quiet certainty, his strange insistence, it was possible for the rational mind to be tricked into believing, just for a moment, that the quackery was real.
And Maxin now had access to a great deal of information. There was no single stockpile of words in Capitas, no library or archive, but through the channels of the Rekef his hands could reach a long way through the dusty scrolls of all the conquered and subject peoples of the Empire.
The Commonweal conquests had brought a great deal of lore into his possession. Most of it was the simple superstition of savages, but he had become more specific in the questions he was asking. There were a lot of Rekef agents in the conquered Dragonfly principalities who must have wondered just why he was asking them to dig up so much old myth and history.
The Commonwealers were writers whose early histories were given in elaborate, credulous detail. Here he had found signs of the thing the Mosquito had spoken of. Not enough to be certain, but enough to know that there had been something, at some time, that the man’s boasts were based on.
‘You wish to examine our sister,’ Alvdan said.
The hooded head bobbed. ‘It is necessary, Your Imperial Majesty.’
‘We had understood,’ the Emperor said, ‘that she was suitable. We believed you had proclaimed her suitable.’ He was now suspicious. Maxin liked him to be suspicious. When Emperors were suspicious they came to the Rekef for their suspicions to be eased, and, here in Capitas, Maxin was the Rekef.
‘Eminently suitable, Your Imperial Majesty,’ the Mosquito said. ‘However, there is no room for error. I must begin my calculations. Even now is not too soon, and such things cannot be hurried.’
‘This is nonsense,’ Alvdan said scornfully. ‘We believe none of this. What you claim cannot be done.’ He stomped away, but Maxin had heard the doubt in his voice, and he knew the Mosquito had too.
‘I am at your disposal,’ Uctebri said quietly. ‘I am your prisoner, your slave – I shall do as you command. There is none who can offer you this but I. No one else, your great Majesty.’
‘Maxin, you cannot really believe this. It goes against all reason,’ the Emperor protested, though in his eyes Maxin saw not fear or contempt, but a hunger. If only it were true, those eyes said, what could we do? What could we not do?
‘I have learned that there are things in this world that cannot be dismissed so easily. In your grandfather’s father’s time, Majesty, our own people had their own strange beliefs. One of which was that we would one day unite and rule the world. Who then would have believed it?’
‘But this is different, Maxin.’
‘Only in the type of belief it requires, Majesty.’
‘So you wish to examine our sister?’ Alvdan said, coming back to face the Mosquito. ‘And that will discomfort her. It will upset her. Good. We are growing to appreciate this plan. But then you say you need more? You do not have here at your disposal all that you need.’
‘It is indeed so, great lord. I have not the power, within my own being, for a work so great as this.’
‘So y
our charlatanry needs fuel to make it go, does it?’
‘I do not recognize such terms, great one,’ Uctebri said, with unctuous humility, ‘but I am sure you are correct.’
‘Your magic box – that is what you need us to retrieve for you?’ the Emperor added derisively. ‘If it were so effective, would it be so easy to locate – or even possible to take?’
Uctebri gave a strange whistling sigh and pulled his enveloping hood halfway back to scratch at his head. His red eyes flicked from Alvdan to the general. ‘Ruins and ash, Your Imperial Majesty, are all that remains of my people’s power, but those who wrought our downfall are now little better. The old days are gone, and shall not come again. Those that were once enthroned on high are cast down, and that which was venerated is spurned in the dust.’ His slender fingers intertwined. ‘This thing that lords and Skryres and princes would have fought for, when its value was known, is now a curiosity in the hands of the ignorant: ignorant men who profess knowledge, and yet know nothing of what they possess. But it has power yet – power that I can use for your benefit, worshipful Majesty.’
‘And if that power is used to our detriment, you know that we shall drain from you each drop of blood that you have fed on, creature,’ Alvdan told him. ‘Succeed and you shall find yourself most honoured amongst our slaves, but do not dream of betrayal.’
‘I am your prisoner . . . your slave,’ the Mosquito repeated, ‘and you may destroy me with a word, now or later, or when my tasks are done. I am most dependent on your good will, mighty one. When I have proved myself by this great service, you shall think kindly of me, I hope, and know that I can do yet more.’
‘Perhaps,’ Alvdan said doubtfully. ‘I have sent the orders, and they should arrive at the city of Helleron even now. Do you know Helleron? We have no free agents nearer your toy, but Helleron has its store of clever folk who do our bidding. The order has gone out to them. If this Box of the Shadow exists, and is where you say it is, they shall capture it for us.’
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