Empire in Black and Gold sota-1

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘I’m going to speak very bluntly now,’ said Stenwold. ‘Are you Arcanum?’

  The Moth’s white eyes widened at that name, at the fact that Stenwold even knew it. The pause stretched across the table. Tisamon watched impassively.

  ‘I am not,’ Achaeos said at last. ‘But. . there are agents in the city, of course. I have spoken to them. They agree that the matter of the Empire of the Wasps may concern them, so I am to report to them.’ Inwardly, Achaeos cringed at the true memory, how he had nagged and nagged his uncaring contact within the Arcanum until he had finally secured the woman’s permission. The backwards-told story for Stenwold sounded so much better. He had not told the Arcanum about Cheerwell or his debt to her, for such things would not be understood. The secret society that passed for the Moth foreign service was not in a tolerant mood these days.

  Stenwold, though, had taken this news strangely. ‘You believe that your people could be persuaded that the Wasps are a threat?’

  Achaeos’s eyes narrowed, trying to judge his angle. ‘It is possible.’

  ‘They are a threat,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘I’ve been saying it all along from here to Collegium and back, and nobody’s been listening. It’s about time though. After we get Cheerwell and Salma back, you and I should talk.’

  Achaeos nodded, privately resolving that, once that rescue was accomplished, he would be gone.

  ‘I suppose we should join the others.’ Stenwold felt the oppressive weight of the near future settle on him with the words. ‘They’re waiting just outside the city.’ He stood, unable not to stare at Tisamon. Here it is, the moment. He had been gifted with so many years in which to ready himself for this, and how he had wasted all that time.

  ‘Do you know where they’re taking her?’ Tisamon asked.

  ‘East, either to Asta or deeper into the Empire.’ Stenwold shuffled, wanting to be gone now, to get it over with. Achaeos was standing, waiting, but Tisamon had other things on his mind.

  ‘I’ve hunted men east of here these last few years. I’ve tracked Wasp convoys. They’re creatures of habit. Do you want me to go ahead and scout?’

  Stenwold paused, the doom on him suddenly staved off a little further. ‘Scout?’ No, it would not be fair on Tisamon. The inevitable would wait and wait, but it would always be there. Far better to face it right away. Even as the thought came to him, though, his voice was betraying him: ‘That would be good. In which case, I’ll trust you to find us by. .’ And how long could this be put off, really? ‘By nightfall?’

  ‘Nightfall it is.’ Tisamon rose, and Stenwold wished they had more time together, there and then, with no rescues to perform. He did not know if he would still have a friend when he and Tisamon met again.

  Scuto had secured transport for them, although Stenwold suspected they might have been better off walking. It was a rickety-looking automotive: a simple open cab balanced on a set of eight rusty legs.

  ‘Is it fast?’ he asked.

  ‘Faster than walking? Just about,’ was the Thorn Bug’s reply. Stenwold peered underneath the contraption’s high-stepping legs. Walking automotives had gone through a period of taking short cuts a generation ago and, as he feared, this one was very much a victim of its times. Instead of eight separate legs there were just two projecting from the engine, so the vehicle would be lurching along on two four-pronged feet.

  ‘It’ll go fine,’ Scuto assured him, ‘so long as you wind it each morning. Two-man job, but you’ve got Totho there to help you. Don’t forget, if you’re complaining, any fuel east of here’s going to have black and yellow stamped all over it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’ A decent clockwork engine had a lot of advantages over steam or combustion. It would never run dry and it was easy enough to repair if it broke down. Stenwold had whittled cogs from wood before now to set one aright.

  ‘What’s troubling you?’ Tynisa asked him suddenly. ‘It’s not just Che, is it?’

  He smiled at her, though his heart sank. ‘It’s. .’ But he could not say it. Anything he said now would be too much of a lie. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he added. When I have to. When I’m forced to it.

  It had been a long day of walking. What rest stops the Wasps had allowed them were overshadowed by the slavers, who never allowed their charges to forget their presence. Water was rationed with a parsimonious hand. Hard bread and stale cheese was their only food. On the march, if any slave faltered he was whipped back into line without hesitation or mercy. Che had begun the day full of pity for her broken-spirited fellows and ended it thanking providence only that she was in better physical shape than most of them.

  Towards dusk it became evident that they were approaching something at last. Some things, in fact: two structures that could not be made out clearly against the darkening sky.

  ‘Farmstead?’ Che suggested. Salma peered ahead, his eyes much better than hers in the gloom.

  ‘Not buildings,’ he confirmed. ‘But I can’t see just what they are.’ Then a slaver passed close to them and they knew well enough to be quiet.

  It was near dark when they arrived, but Che recognized them by then, because she had seen similar constructions before. They were automotives, but monstrous huge ones. She had seen them used for bulk transport of stock, and stock, she realized, was just what she and the others had become.

  For a score and a half of slaves, even one of these machines would have been too capacious, but the cages that made up the back half of each were already mostly full. It was more of the same, Che noticed, but she could not believe that all of these unfortunates were supposed to be escapees. Even as they approached the two great engines, another column of prisoners was moving up — from the south as far as she could judge. Hairless men with dead white skins, jutting jaws and pincered hands, the slave-runners of the newcomers loomed head and shoulder over their charges. Che watched numbly as their leader met with a delegation of Wasp slavers and began to haggle over the price of his wares.

  ‘From the Dryclaw,’ she guessed. ‘Or even the Spiderlands. It depends how far they’ve come. The Empire must provide a ready market.’

  ‘Oh it does,’ Salma confirmed. ‘The Empire is built on their shoulders. Slaves work in their fields and build their houses. Slaves go down their mines and attend their every need. The Empire is built on slaves’ backs and on their bones, Che. And as for the Wasps themselves — fortune forbid they should take up any work but soldiering.’

  Che glanced up at him. ‘Does the Commonweal have slaves?’

  His smile grew wry. ‘We don’t call them that, but I suppose if you have paid slaves in your factories, then we have slaves in all but name working our land. What an open-minded man the College has made of me.’

  Their column was now stopped and she saw Brutan and Thalric, a careful distance between them, go and speak to the leader of the automotive-riders. The big, pale southerners were concluding their business. Their hands looked so vicious, made for nothing but fighting, that Che stared at them in awe. In the flickering firelight there was nothing about them that did not speak of casual violence. Their clothes were a mishmash of leather, hide and chain mail. They had axes at their belts or else huge swords slung across broad shoulders. They looked at the Wasps with brash and measured expressions.

  Brutan had returned to his own men and was giving out some orders. Che caught only the occasional word, but enough to understand that they would be camping here for the night, and would be moving on with the machines in the morning. She looked around for Thalric but he was still with the machinists, discussing something in close detail with their leader. Apparently in the absence of any other instructions, the convoy crew winched down the cage doors of the automotives and began to herd the slaves out.

  There was another palisade, two in fact, but this time pitched in a semi-circle about the rear of each of the automotives, where the only place to go freely would be the inside of a metal-barred cage. The convoy drivers secured all the slaves to the palisaded stakes, thei
r human bounty now numbering over seventy souls.

  The slaves stayed hugging the perimeter, not venturing into the central space for fear of calling the slavers’ notice, until the Wasps decided to feed them, long after they themselves had eaten. With a practised swing one of them hurled a cloth bag into the very centre of the pen, and immediately sheer chaos erupted. Che herself stood no chance. If she had even moved it would have been into a maelstrom of elbows and knees and fists as the slaves fought over the meagre fare.

  I always did want to lose a little weight, she reflected as she pressed back against the palisade until the melee broke up, leaving only a few scuffling bodies locked in combat over the remaining crusts and crumbs. With a weary sigh, Salma dropped down beside her. She had not even realized he had joined in. Wordlessly he handed her a mangled handful of broken biscuit, hard waybread, a ragged fragment of cheese.

  ‘You’ve got some for yourself?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘Then thank you.’

  A shadow fell across them. Expecting a slaver, Che looked up to find a burly Ant-kinden looming over them.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked, and he lunged for her, or rather for the food in her hands. Even faster, Salma was in the way, lurching up from his sitting position to put a shoulder in the man’s hip, toppling him to the floor. Salma remained standing as the Ant got to his feet. He looked about twice as broad as the young Dragonfly, whip-scarred and well-muscled. The slaves on either side of Che were shuffling sideways, hastily trying to get out of the way. Salma shifted his footing, waiting for the Ant to make a move.

  ‘Oh now, listen!’ Che shouted, or at least she intended to shout, but it came out more as a squeak. ‘There’s no need for any of this. We’re all slaves here. Why fight amongst ourselves?’

  Everyone was gaping at her as though she was mad, slaves and slavers both. She even caught sight of Thalric, ten feet beyond the gamblers, staring at her.

  ‘We’re better than that,’ she told the slaves, turning her back on the Wasp captain. ‘We might be in chains, but we don’t have to amuse them by behaving like animals.’

  The Ant made his move then, because Salma had been distracted by her outburst, but he underestimated the Dragonfly’s speed. Salma was in the air at once — for the four feet of extra height his leash allowed him, and he savagely kicked the big Ant across the face twice before coming down on the other side of him. Furious, the Ant rounded on him, and then made a dash for Salma’s leash as it stretched taut across the pen. Even as he yanked on it, Salma was already moving for him, and got an elbow into the side of his head and then a fist into his chin. The Ant swayed but he still tugged viciously down on the leash, almost dragging Salma off his feet, and then got a hand on the Dragonfly’s wrist and twisted, hard.

  Salma grimaced as his arm was bent back. He hit the Ant twice, three times with his free hand, but the Ant absorbed the blows stoically. Che looked around at the slaves nearest her but it was obvious nobody was going to step in.

  She jumped up and hurtled in herself. No sword here, and she had never fought bare-handed before. That was not an art the College taught. Still, she threw her entire weight forwards in a lunge for the big Ant.

  She had been hoping to strike him in the side or the waist, to topple him and break his grip on her friend by sheer momentum. In the dark, though, he was further away than she had guessed. She felt herself falling short, had a frantic impression of the ground rushing towards her, and then her shoulder, and her weight behind it, slammed into one side of the man’s knee.

  The Ant howled in sheer agony and rolled onto his back, twisted into a ball. Che found herself sprawled at Salma’s feet, staring upwards. He did not even look at her at first, eyes on his fallen opponent, but the Ant’s howls of pain were now fading into wretched sobbing. There would be no more threat from that quarter any time soon. Salma finally extended one hand and then the other, and with a wince helped her up to her feet. Both of them feeling bruised, they retired to their little patch of earth.

  The rest of the slaves were watching them narrowly, in case they would make themselves the new tyrants of the dispossessed. Che and Salma ignored them, huddling together for warmth as the chill of the night descended.

  Eighteen

  Tisamon was waiting for them at nightfall, just as promised: a whipcord-lean figure caught in the sun’s last rays at the crest of a low hill, angular even under a cloak. His travel habits had not changed. There was a long bag slung on his back that must be his bowcase, and he wore a rapier alongside it that Stenwold had never seen him use. He might have been waiting there for ten minutes or for a hundred years.

  Stenwold screwed the fragments of his courage together, halting the awkwardly lumbering automotive just before the hill’s incline and clambering down. It had not exactly been the most amicable of journeys so far. The machine itself was clumsy and long overdue for scrapping, while Totho and Achaeos had instantly developed an intense dislike for one another, making any conversation difficult.

  ‘They’re picking up company.’ Tisamon’s voice reached him as Stenwold ascended the hill. ‘Another half-dozen soldiers. Another score of slaves. It’s going to be interesting when we come to extract them.’

  Extract them? Like a barber pulling a tooth? Stenwold looked at the mess of tracks Tisamon showed him, that held no secrets for his eyes.

  ‘I can go on tracking all night if you want,’ Tisamon offered, and briefly the spectre of hope, of another stay of execution, raised itself.

  ‘No,’ said Stenwold, more firmly than he had intended. ‘I don’t think our transport could manage to keep up in any event. There are parts of it that definitely need tightening before we go further.’

  ‘What is that monster, anyway? We’ve shared some grotesque mounts in our time, but that thing deserves some sort of award.’ Tisamon was never exactly merry, but there was a lightness to his tone that cut Stenwold to the bone.

  ‘Tisamon. I have to. . I have to. .’ How long had he been given to prepare the words, and now they were nowhere to be found. ‘I have to tell you something.’

  They were fast approaching the automotive and its three silent passengers. Tisamon’s pace did not slacken, but something changed in his posture, his breathing, as Stenwold’s anxiety jumped across to him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. They were now so close. The setting sun was behind the machine so that they were standing in its long shadow.

  ‘I. .’ But like a well in the desert, the words had dried up since he last visited them. ‘I have to. . show you something.’

  Tisamon stopped at last. His face was blank.

  ‘Time to make camp,’ Stenwold called out to the automotive’s passengers. ‘Achaeos, can you make a fire?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I might need Beetle ingenuity for that?’ said the Moth acidly, flitting down from the machine with obvious relish.

  ‘Tisamon, this is Totho,’ Stenwold said as the artificer climbed down. Tisamon barely spared him a nod. ‘Totho,’ Stenwold added, ‘would you take a look at the machine, make sure everything’s still in place.’

  ‘Good idea,’ agreed Totho, and he unslung his tools and crouched down between the automotive’s legs, but not without a backward glance at his mentor.

  ‘And. .’ Here we are. ‘This is Tynisa.’

  ‘Tynisa?’ Tisamon said, but it was the name alone, the Spider-kinden name, that had caught his ear. He was staring at her as she let herself down the ungainly machine’s side, and his eyes were fixed on her face when she turned to him.

  Tisamon made a wordless sound, deep in his throat, like an animal at bay. In a moment he had dropped into his fighting stance, and his claw was raised and drawn back. Stenwold had not even noticed it on his hand a moment before. What surprised Stenwold was that Tynisa was already out with her rapier, and clearly every bit as ready to fight.

  ‘Tisamon,’ he shouted, ‘listen to me!’

  ‘What is this?’ the Mantis cried in a tone of pure horror
. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Tisamon,’ Stenwold began again. ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Explain?’ Tisamon’s eyes were like a strangled man’s. His teeth were bared, every muscle in his body bowstringtaut. The last rays of the sun touched the blade of his claw, caught the long line of Tynisa’s rapier. Achaeos and Totho remained utterly motionless, utterly at a loss.

  ‘Stenwold, what’s going on?’ Tynisa said tightly.

  There was a moment in the very near future, seconds away only, when Tisamon would snap, and then blood would be shed. Stenwold could foresee it with complete clarity. In a normal fight this man was ice, but his own emotions were fiercer enemies than he could ever face down. He heard a hiss escape through the enraged man’s clenched teeth, and knew that the clock’s hands were down, the strike was here. He lunged forward between them, almost onto the point of Tynisa’s sword, seeing Tisamon dodge behind him and the claw sweeping down. He closed his eyes.

  He heard Tynisa scream and felt a stabbing pain in his shoulder, and something very cold, the thinnest of thin lines, against his throat. Everything seemed to have stopped.

  He opened his eyes very slowly. The first thing he saw was Tynisa before him, her face stricken, and for a moment he thought she must have stabbed him. Her arm was extended, and he followed its line as best as his current situation would allow. There was the hilt of her sword and the narrow blade. . and Tisamon’s hand was flat against it, and the rapier’s length caught between his palm and the spines of his forearm. Its point was frozen over Stenwold’s shoulder, trapped on its way directly towards Tisamon’s face.

  Tisamon’s other arm, his right, was across Stenwold’s shoulders, the spines digging straight through the hardened leather and into his flesh. The folding blade of the Mantis’s claw was closed about Stenwold’s throat like a clasp-knife, and it was impossible for him to tell whether it had drawn blood or not. Beyond Tynisa he glimpsed Totho with a spanner in his hand, mouth hanging open; and there was Achaeos, somewhere further off, his dagger clear of its scabbard but pointedly not part of the conflict.