'Find me transport to Forest Alim from Shalk End,' he requested. 'We'll take the river from there to Khanaphes.'
'Shalk End?' Marger said. That meant the Shalk below them, the quarry and its slaves. It was certainly possible to shortcut to the plain below by descending the face of the mine workings, but not usual. 'Is there something I should know?'
If you were meant to know, you'd already have been told, Thalric thought, still with assassins in mind. 'I like a bit of variety, Captain,' he said. 'Besides, wouldn't you like to see the Empire's largest quarry in operation?'
Marger shrugged, predictably. 'I'll go lean on the foreman,' he replied.
Thalric nodded. 'Osgan, go find the Consortium and get enough supplies for a tenday for the six of us.'
The man started on hearing his name and seemed to wrestle with the words before agreeing.
'Good,' Thalric nodded. 'The rest of you, wait by the machine until we're ready.' He smiled at the Beetle and two Wasps and they regarded him cautiously. They had none of them decided precisely what he was, and he wondered what they might have already heard.
Which leaves me at liberty in Shalk. But he would have to be quick. No doubt Marger would be prompt enough in doing his job.
The garrison at Shalk was unusual at the best of times, but even more unsettled now since the insurrection. Its purpose had always been to safeguard the mines and the quarry, rather than to intimidate a naturally obsequious populace. The current military personnel were all new, the traitorous old guard having been rooted out or fled, or else died on the field before Tyrshaan. The staff, though, the underlings who kept everything running, were the same old faces. For most such garrisons they dragged Auxillians from halfway across the Empire, putting them among foreigners to limit any chance of betrayal.
The Shalken themselves were an exception, however. Where most other kinden were unwilling partners, slaves of the Empire with their families and home cities held hostage for their good behaviour, Flies and Beetle-kinden had proved willing subjects of the crown since the Empire's early days. The halls of the Shalken garrison were busy with diminutive forms — in the air and on the ground — of cleaners, messengers, scribes and servants. They went about their duties deftly, with the eternal pragmatism of their kind.
Thalric sought out the records office, where messages came in either for filing or passing on. The Fly-kinden had long made Shalk the South-Empire's great message hub, which had been difficult while the traitor governors divided up the South between them. Now everything was returning to business as usual, and the same faces were to be found at the same desks. All except one.
It had been a lucky piece of research, but Thalric liked to keep in touch with his old friends.
He spotted the man quickly, just another Fly-kinden sorting papers in a pool of sunlight under a window. Thalric made his way behind the man's desk, appearing to peruse a rack of scrolls thoughtfully, and in a low voice murmured, 'A strange place to find a lieutenant of the Rekef, one might think.'
The Fly did not pause in his work, did not even twitch. 'If one thought that, one might wonder whether it was common knowledge,' he said, as if speaking to the ledger he was marking.
'Not yet,' Thalric replied, and he heard the smallest sigh.
'Some of us fall despite our best endeavours, some of us rise despite our tribulations,' the Fly observed. 'For instance, I saw your name included on an execution list, shortly before I decided to retire.'
'You don't ever retire from the Rekef, te Berro.'
'No, they retire you instead.' Thalric heard the misery in te Berro's voice. 'Might one ask how it is that a dead man is now Regent of the Empire? I've followed your career with interest.'
Of course you have. For te Berro was a Rekef man, and that training did not sit idle. Even here, in hiding, he had clearly put himself in a position to gather information, even if he was doing so only for himself. It reminded Thalric of his own behaviour in occupied Tharn, when he had been acting as Stenwold's agent. Old habits like that didn't die.
'You must have jumped ship from Reiner's people, if you got to see that list,' Thalric noted.
'Oh, I was on the good ship Maxin a while previously. But then a high-up operation went sour and I judged it a good time to vanish. And now it appears I didn't vanish well enough.'
'With all the changes at the capital, they haven't even started cleaning house properly,' Thalric reassured him. 'Still, it's only a matter of time. I hear Solarno is nice, this time of year. Perhaps you're due for a holiday, assuming they don't hear about you shortly.'
Another sigh. 'What do you want, Thalric?'
'Information. There was an attempt on my life in Tyrshaan. What was the follow up?'
'They strung up three of Governor Vargen's men within days. Case closed.'
Thalric stifled a chuckle. 'And after that?'
'There's a very definite kind of … silence from that direction.'
Thalric nodded, satisfied. It meant that General Brugan had matters properly in hand. After public executions that would reassure the real wrongdoers, the Rekef would start their own covert investigation. It was a way of doing things he had used himself often enough.
'Anything else?' he asked, as if still talking to the racking. 'Don't hold out on me, now.'
'Everything's still upside down here in the South-Empire,' te Berro complained. 'Reliable news is hard to come by. They're still purging Tyrshaan.'
'Who hates me that much, te Berro?'
The Fly made an amused noise. 'Grief, man, who doesn't? They hate the Empress? They hate you. They worked for General Reiner? They hate you. They're just loyal Imperial citizens who remember too much about the war …'
'I get the message.' Thalric gritted his teeth, hearing again the truth that Osgan had already given him. I am now a foreigner in my own country.
'Well, we make good messengers.' The Fly appeared at Thalric's elbow and started filing scrolls with care. 'Not that I've got anything against reunions, but you're a dangerous man to be around. What happens now?'
The image came to Thalric of a rooftop garden in Myna, of te Berro saving his life with a well-placed arrow. 'I go south and I advise you to get yourself outside the Empire's borders while they change the guard. Maybe, when the next big war looms, they'll look to their old agents, especially those who have been making a life for themselves meanwhile in Solarno or the Lowlands. Until then, I'd keep my head well down, if I were you.'
Still not looking at him, te Berro nodded. 'A holiday on the Exalsee?' he mused. 'I think I've earned it.'
They were winched down the face of the Shalk quarry among descending bundles of mining supplies and a barrel of firepowder charges. The Empire's slaves crawled across the scaffolded rock-face, cutting and measuring, hacking and breaking. There was a scattering of Fly-kinden artificers there for the technical work but the rest were imported labour — Flies were physically and temperamentally unsuited to such hard toil. Instead, Shalk had inherited hundreds of the Empire's most robust. There were Ant-kinden and Beetles, prisoners from Szar and Myna, and everywhere the vast, lumbering shapes of the Mole Crickets. Almost half the adult population of Least Delve had been herded here after the Empire had taken the place twenty years ago. They were not a numerous people but their skill with stone was such that they were ruthlessly put under the whip wherever they were found. Back home at the Delve, their families — especially the children who lacked the Art to simply slip away into the earth — were closely held as strict surety for their parents' continued industry.
The air was so thick with dust that Thalric's party was forced to breathe through cloth. They observed the quarry's vertiginous workings through goggles that had to be cleaned and cleaned again to stop them silting over, and the air was painfully dry. Work in mines and quarries was the Empire's rod for its worst offenders, the final destination of those whose luck had entirely expired. Here, sharing the forced labour of the Mole Crickets, were the deserters, the prisoners of war, the traitor
s whose physical strength would now serve the Empire they had betrayed until it gave out on them and they died.
Thalric, surveying all this as their lift jerked and shuddered its way downwards, thought, I, too, could have been here, so easily. Certainly there were enough other Wasp-kinden toiling at the cliff face.
At the foot of the descent there was the pit, where the quarry had been extended further into the earth. The entire cliff face above was riddled with blast-holes and mineshafts. There had been a web of gold here once, long since exhausted, but now they had found rich seams of iron. Overlooking the quarry itself stood a squat, brooding ziggurat that housed more of the Shalk garrison, with the workers' pitiful huts corralled all around it.
Marger had been conscientious in his arrangements. There was a Slave Corps expedition setting out that was already waiting for them before the garrison. They would travel along the line of the ridge, stopping at each spring and waterhole to trade with the desert Scorpions, until they reached the river and the green edge of Forest Alim. There the slavers and Thalric's expedition would part company.
Thalric found surprisingly little curiosity in himself about his destination or his journey, even about the Lowlanders he was heading off to spy on. All that matters is that I'm moving further away. He felt the Empress as a constant pressure in the back of his mind, but he was now putting the miles between them, and there must come a point where her presence would fade.
You will come back to me, she had said. He shuddered, successfully hiding it in the rocking motion as the crude lift touched down. Marger and his people unloaded their supplies, and Thalric automatically shouldered a crate himself, without even thinking of his elevated position. When he realized, halfway across the quarry-pit and into the shadow of the garrison, he smiled to himself. O Regent, see how I escape you.
Twelve
The river Jamail was the child of the slanting sheets of rain that fell daily against the Morgen Range, the clouds emptying themselves over the dense forest and denying the arid Nem water and life. From a hundred channels deep inside the forest, coalescing from a forest floor that in the wettest seasons was actually submerged, arose the snaking Jamail that began its long, looping progress south, out of the woodland, cutting its course through the dry lands and bringing fragile abundance to those who claimed its banks. From Alim, the logging town up against the forest's petering edge, all the way downriver to the marsh delta, extended the Dominion of Khanaphes, as it had done since time immemorial.
Thalric had expected something rough from Alim. Researches had told him that, as the furthest-flung outpost of Khanaphir territory, it served as nothing more than a port for forest timber. He had expected only a collection of wooden huts and a pier, and was therefore surprised.
Forest Alim was dominated by what he first assumed was a fortress, but then revised as a fortified palace. It was ancient, partly overgrown by the forest's resurgence, looming over the waters from the river's far side. Beyond the wall, as the slavers approached, he caught occasional glimpses of colonnades and ornamented rooftops. A stone pier jutted into the young river, dominated by a great, broad barge half loaded with timber, while half a dozen smaller vessels huddled in its lee.
The slavers were not interested in this place: it was simply the point where they would turn around and head back to Shalk. As Thalric's band approached carefully, he noticed a little patchwork of fields on the near side of the river, divided and subdivided by irrigation dykes excavated outward from the river itself. The men and women working in the fields were solid, bald-headed Beetle-kinden and paid them no notice whatsoever. In the face of their stoic labouring, which seemed to admit nothing of time or progress, Thalric felt his mission, the entire Empire, being subtly dismissed. You are not important to us, they were saying. We shall work here and you shall pass, and we shall continue on.
Outside the walled palace, which Thalric guessed would house the garrison and administration from distant Khanaphes, Forest Alim consisted of a cluster of warehouses and a sawmill. Even these buildings were stone-walled, however, converted to their present purpose from whatever ancient rites they had been built for. Thalric had taken a quick look into the sawmill, where he watched men slicing trees into planks by hand, working with huge two-man saws, or with foot-powered circular blades. By Imperial standards it was laughable, but they worked fast and with no sign of tiring.
Marger, and the two Wasps in his team, had gone to enquire about securing passage downriver, and Thalric was left hoping that he would find something faster than that ponderous barge. Aside from a scattering of fishing boats, the only vessel of any stature was a narrow, open craft, piled with cushions at one end to seat a privileged passenger, and equipped with eight oars and a single mast. It had been left unattended, as though the simple status of its owner was sufficient to see off any unwanted attention. Thalric was even considering whether it might be worth making off with, if nothing else presented itself.
'You know, for a logging town, they don't seem to fell many trees,' observed the Beetle-kinden Rekef man, who had been staring into the forest for some time. Their seat near the quay gave them a good view of the darkness between the tree trunks.
Thalric glanced at him curiously and the prompt died on his lips as he saw it — so obvious that it had escaped notice. 'No stumps,' he concurred. 'No cut trees at all. Not the sound of an axe, nothing beyond the sawmill.'
The Beetle nodded. His name was Corolly Vastern and he was old enough to have been a veteran before the Twelve-year War. He was strong, though, with his kind's long-reaching endurance. His face settled into a slight smile, calculated from long practice to dispel any Wasp ire towards an inferior race. 'I've been watching for a while, and all the wood comes from deeper in. These Beetles've got it worked out so they don't even need to cut their own.'
There was a steady trickle of outsiders heading into Alim. They were not Khanaphir but men and women with skin the rich colour of teak. Some kind of long-limbed, loping Ant-kinden, they appeared bearing wood. Chains of them bore whole trees aloft out of the forest, from who knew what distance, or floated them down the river towards the sawmill. Thalric saw Khanaphir scribes carefully noting the arrival of each group on their scrolls. No money changed hands and he wondered if these forest Ants were slaves of Khanaphes in some way. It occurred to him belatedly — and it oddly disturbed him — that he had no idea at all what precise kinden these forest-dwellers were. They were at the borders of the Empire, but the forest of the Alim was an utter unknown. Imperial expansion had been so rapid that their own scouts had barely been able to keep track of it.
Osgan, lying back, began to snore softly, though for once it was not due to drink — or not entirely. Thalric had been keeping an eye on him, and the man had barely taken a sip at his hip-flask. It was the unaccustomed pace that had worn him out.
'Major Thalric …' Corolly began, in a subtly different tone.
'I know,' Thalric interrupted. 'The Khanaphir sitting over there, he's been watching us for almost twenty minutes now. Maybe it's just that the locals are curious.'
'Don't know about that,' Corolly muttered. 'In fact, that's the one thing they aren't. Six men of the Empire turn up on their doorstep, and nobody even turns a head to look. Except him.'
'Well, then,' said Thalric, 'let's force the matter, shall we? I'll go and ask some directions of a local.'
'Directions?' the Beetle said, a tilt of his head indicating that the only meaningful directions here were up the river or down.
'Something similar.' Thalric stood up, casting his eyes over the quay again. They were loading the barge with more planks, teams of Khanaphir labourers sweating and hauling as they sang a low, rhythmic tune with words he could not follow. He sauntered over towards the watcher, expecting the man to suddenly find urgent business elsewhere. Instead he stood his ground, so Thalric had a chance to examine him properly. He was not young, although these Khanaphir were difficult to age, what with their bald scalps and dark, sun-creased face
s. He wore a white robe that fell from one shoulder, leaving half of his chest bare. Thalric noted a respectable quantity of gold: rings, amulets, pendants, even gold tassels on his robes. At Thalric's approach, he only nodded politely.
'Excuse me,' Thalric said. 'I don't suppose you know who owns that boat over there?'
The man smiled at him as if he had been handed a compliment. 'Of course I do, Honoured Foreigner, for it is mine.'
Caught off balance, Thalric blinked. 'Then you are …'
'O stranger, I have been waiting here for you to ask me to carry you to Khanaphes. If your need is so great, there was no need to be reticent.'
'How did you know?' Thalric asked, through gritted teeth. His agent's senses were abruptly alert, feeling great wheels moving invisibly around him. The spy in him was compromised, his mission open knowledge. Escape. Fall back. Except there was no falling back here, because the mission had not even started.
The old man's smile remained the same faintly puzzled piece of politeness as before, as if Thalric's tension had passed him by unremarked. 'Where else would a party of foreigners of such distinction wish to go?' he asked. Trying to read the man's face was exactly like trying to read a good spy, a spy who might or might not be working on the right side.
'My name is Akneth, and I am a gatherer of taxes for the Masters of Khanaphes. If you would do me the honour, O Foreigner, of voyaging upon my ship, then I will be ready to cast off in the morning.' The old man had been sitting on a mooring post, and now pushed himself to his feet with a grunt suggesting some effort. Hearing it, Thalric added another ten years to his estimated age. 'I would be glad of the company,' Akneth continued, then made a short bow, one hand pressed briefly to his stomach. Thalric managed a nod in return but, in the face of that patiently avuncular smile, all of his instincts were clamouring for him to draw his sword.
'Well,' he said, as he rejoined Corolly, 'we have secured our passage downriver.'
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