For a moment he thought she would crack, that the conflicting, boiling, wretched feelings inside her would spill out and admit to fallibility, but then she just shook her head. “Let’s do it,” she instructed.
“Fine. You go out, as my slave, talk to some guards, ask for some food, some decent wine. Flirt a bit, if you want. Dance for them, if they ask. Word will have spread, and they seem easily pleased here.” He caught her glare and spread his hands theatrically. “What? You think you’re that good? Just be glad they’re bored. You do all that, and I’ll be up top, Art and shadows, springing the locks on one of the windows. All good. Then I’ll go do the rounds, chat to the guards, maybe flirt a little.” He looked for a smile, and didn’t find it. “Meanwhile, you take a lantern or something, hang it outside the window I’ve cracked, so the others know we’ve done it. After that it’s up to them. How’s my plan?”
“Just be glad they’re stupid here,” she shot back acidly.
Cordwick’s preference would have been to wait in his room, to sleep even, until the shouting started, and then to take his exit by whatever window or door looked most promising. Tesse, however, was a most unpromising partner in crime. She was going to meet Darien on his entrance, no matter what. She said it was her duty to him, and Cordwick knew that it was because she wanted a pat on the head from her idol.
“You stay here then,” she told him. “You save your own hide. Probably Evandter won’t care enough to come after you.”
“Come after me for what?” Cordwick objected. “I’ve done my part. I’ve got them in.”
“I’m sure he’ll see it that way,” she told him sweetly, and stepped out.
“House of my father!” Cordwick swore. It was a good oath. He saved it for special occasions. After the echo of it had returned to him he got off the bed and followed the errant Fly-kinden.
There were still guards patrolling, and the guard on the entry to the cellars had been doubled since Cordwick had last seen it. His credentials were obviously well-known enough that he received just respectful nods and the occasional salute from the men who passed him. In the great central chamber of the castle, however, he and Tesse were alone. Patrols would come and go, he knew, but Borden had not seen fit to keep a permanent watch here in the heart of his castle. Wasps were daylight creatures and even soldiers had to sleep, and so the night sentries would be concentrated at the gates, and down below.
Down below where Darien must go. Well, that was surely Darien’s problem, and anyone fool enough to follow him. No reason why it should fall on Cordwick’s shoulders. And yet here I am.
The castle was lit mostly by wall-hung oil-lamps, which filled the place with shadows. The colonel’s dining hall had been gaslit, the modern lighting fussing and spitting in its glass bowls, but such enterprise was costly and occasionally dangerous, and the imperial engineers had left most of the castle with little more than its original Commonwealer owners would have used. Sitting in the gloom, hidden from the occasional guard that passed, Cordwick and Tesse did not have to wait long.
Above them, the shutters were silently opened, and three forms slipped in, feathering down on wings of Art. Cordwick expected them to spring into action instantly, but instead the two men were watching Philomaea as the Moth woman looked about them. The grey-skinned woman held up her hand. “Wait, my lord...”
Darien frowned at her. “Philomaea? She is here, is she not? You have traced her here?”
“Yes, but...” The Moth bared her teeth. “Something is wrong. I cannot... The Wasps and their machines. It is hard for me to concentrate.”
“It is a trap, I know that,” Darien confirmed. “We are prepared for them.”
“There are guards all over, below us,” Tesse put in. “She must be there.”
“Then that is where we will go,” Darien said simply. Cordwick caught a glimpse of Philomaea’s agonised expression and guessed suddenly that it was not just the readiness of the Wasps that had her by the throat. Some other wrongness had hold of her but she could not put it into any words, let alone words strong enough to sway Prince Lowre Darien from his purpose.
“Patrol coming,” Tesse said abruptly.
“Everyone be still,” the Moth snapped instantly. Cordwick, who was already back into the shadows, leant back against the wall and all but held his breath. To his eyes, the others were painfully obvious, standing in shadows but not even attempting to hide. He heard the bootsteps then, and a pair of Wasp soldiers walked in, one of them laughing behind his hand at something his comrade had said. Philomaea was staring at them, her hands curled into claws. Under that blank-eyed gaze the two soldiers passed by, somehow failing to see any of then, Moth or Mantis or Dragonfly prince. They went almost in arm’s reach of Darien himself, ignoring him as though he was just some piece of long-familiar statuary, and carried on their round, oblivious.
Then Evandter was abruptly behind them, taking a dagger from the belt of one of the Wasps and ripping it, in two brutally economic passes, across their throats. There was no cry from them, just a choking gurgle that made Cordwick sick to the stomach, and then they were on the ground, kicking out their last. Bloody blade in hand, the Mantis regarded his fellows.
“Why?” Cordwick hissed at him, made bold by horror. “Why do that? They were about to go!”
“Because I willed it,” Evandter told him coldly. “Now, do we have a rescue to undertake, or shall we wait here for the next two? I could kill the whole garrison pair by pair if you prefer.”
“Tesse, which way to the cellars?” Darien directed, after shooting the Mantis a look of disgust.
“Follow,” the Fly said. “There are guards...”
“Philomaea shall let us pass them. We shall leave them alive.” Darien glared at Evandter. “That way, when these poor wretches are discovered, thety shall not think that we have gone that way.”
“Pass them? Six of them are at the very door,” Cordwick objected.
“You understand nothing,” the Moth told him disdainfully.
Cordwick, veteran of a hundred confidence schemes, did indeed have to confess that he understood nothing. There were ways he knew of getting past guards. They involved talking to them, or creeping riskily behind them, or causing some distraction.
Philomaea did none of these things, not quite. No words were exchanged, the guards had their backs to the door to prevent just such creeping, and there was no distraction that Cordwick could see or hear. Nonetheless, once they were in sight of the cellar door, something spooked the guards. One drew his sword, another held a hand out, palm open. Something in the shadows had their attention, and the whole pack of them hunched cautiously forwards, caught between waiting to sound an alarm and fear of ridicule in case it was nothing. Eventually one of them forged ahead a dozen steps, the rest half of the way with them. Behind them, as they peered into the gloom, the intruders went neatly through the door.
No lock, Cordwick noted. It was still the original Dragonfly piece, secured by a hook-and-cord arrangement. I’d have put a lock on the cellar door, if I were keeping prisoners down there. He filed the thought for later, absently.
There were stone-flagged stairs, then. These old castles always had a complex piece of business beneath them, Maille being an extreme example. As Dragonfly-kinden were a people of air and sunlight, it had always puzzled Cordwick, but he guessed now was not the time to bring it up. Beneath them they could hear more Wasps, the sound of a few voices in idle, grumbling conversation. As they reached the stairs’ end Cordiwck could identify a handful of soldiers, the rattle of dice. The gaming table was set up immediately where the stairs came out, and Cordwick saw a half-dozen Wasps idling there. Philomaea held up a hand for silence and led the way. The shadows seemed to gather about her and Cordwick shuddered, feeling abruptly chilled more than the stone around him could account for. Not one of the Wasps looked round, not one. Instead, the Moth seemed to trail a cloak of night behind her, that each of her companions partook of.
I am involved wit
h something I want no part of, Cordwick told himself, but that was nothing new. What was new was the gaslamps and pipes bolted to the walls. Here, where the darkness could never be relieved by the sun, the Wasps had set up a patchwork of modern lighting, but perhaps it was still being installed or out of service, for intruders and guards both had only the meagre oil lamps to rely on.
There was a maze of chambers down there, cellars beyond cellars, low corridors and low rooms, and stairs that went to lower cellars still. The walls had been marked, at some stage, but time and crawling lichen had sufficed to obscure the markings, and they seemed meaningless little squiggles to Cordwick, wherever he could make them out. Still, Philomaea led them in fits and starts, stopping every so often with that uncertain, suspicious look, her worry ebbing and returning. Each time she only had to look back at the trusting, expectant face of Lowre Darien to reassure her, and she was leading them off again.
Their progress was a series of stops and starts, shadow to shadow, and every step brought more Wasps: the cellars were crawling with them and the bulk of them in armour and ready for battle. This was the trap, then. The serrated jaws trembled on all sides and yet Philomaea led them step by step and not a single soldier marked them.
Cordwick was reminded of certain war stories he had heard from Imperial soldiers. The Commonweal lost battles, on the whole: it lost them gloriously and with colossal waste of life, so that the Monarch would have been better served executing a significant percentage of the population in the conquered principalities, and then just signing over the devastated remains. The Commonweal lost battles, but the Empire lost officers. The stories were too circumstantial to be mere fiction. Commonweal mercers and assassins had walked into command tents, into colonel’s quarters, into the sanctums of the Empire’s finest, and left neat corpses to attest to their presence, followed shortly after by harsh discipline for the sentries and guards involved. And is this it? Did they breeze in, invisible as air, like this? Cordwick had no answers.
They paused at a crossroads, the Moth looking from one dark passageway to the other. The guttering oil lamps were their friends, for the Wasps clustered close to them, blind to the darkness. The intruders’ impossible progress had taken them deep into the heart of the castle’s underside.
“Which way?” murmured Darien, on a knife-edge of anticipation.
“I...” Cordwick could not make out the Moth’s expression but her voice trembled. “This way, I think...” One hand indicated a direction indistinctly. “Something is wrong. I am unsure.” All around them the clatter and chatter of three score of imperial soldiers was constant, putting Cordwick in mind of the hum of a hive that any moment might erupt in stinging wings.
“I smell something,” Tesse whispered, and the Beetle realised that he did, too, a familiar chemical scent of...
And then the lights came on. The automatic strikers wheeled sparks in the sconces, and a moment after there were tall flames leaping behind glass all throughout the cellars, banishing night with an artificial dawn.
Philomaea cried out, just a desperate denial of what had happened, but whatever veil she had carried with her was banished with the darkness and a dozen Wasps had already spotted the intruders, leaping up with exclamations of surprise and alarm.
Cordwick dropped, falling to his knees and dragging Tesse to him just as she was about to take wing. He saw a soldier’s palm flash fire and Philomaea was punched off her feet, a blackened circle smoking beneath her throat. Tesse was fighting him, kicking and struggling, but then Evandter and Darien were in motion and she stopped, just watching.
Golden stingshot danced about them, but they were neither of them hit, though the stone above Cordiwck’s head was scorched and charred. Then Darien had his swords into two of his enemy, and the Mantis was butchering the other way, taking and discarding the swords of his foes as he chose. For a few packed seconds there was no pattern to it, Cordwick’s eyes could not follow the swift exchange. Then both fighters were gone. Neither had taken the way that Philomaea had indicated, each letting the tide of the fight determine their most efficient path to more of the foe.
“Oh – oh –” Tesse crawled over two dead Wasps to get to Philomaea, but the Moth was quite dead.
“They knew,” Cordwick said quietly. “Whatever she was doing, they knew it. They let us get so far, and no further.”
“Shut up,” Tesse spat at him. “We’re going to rescue her.”
“What?”
“Nysse Ceann. She’s this way, Philo said. Darien will be coming for her, the Mantis too. We’ll go there.”
“We?”
“I need you for the locks!” she hissed. “And if you run now, and if Evandter doesn’t hunt you down, I swear, you craven lump, I’ll kill you myself!” Her teeth were bared, her eyes flaring. She was a quarter of his size and yet he thought she would leap on him and try for his throat with her teeth.
They seemed momentarily beneath the notice of the Empire. However many soldiers Borden had stowed down here, they were all engaged in trying to contain Darien and Evandter.
“Let’s go,” Cordwick agreed, and the two of the scuttled off, their path brightly lit by the sear of the gaslamps.
They came to another cellar almost immediately, cluttered with barrels that were patched with mildew, some old Commonweal stash that nobody had got round to dealing with. The gaslamps were fewer here, and Cordwick was grimly certain that they had been in the very epicentre of the modern lighting when the lamps had been struck up. Two further halls led off, and for a moment they dithered, unsure which way to go. Then from their left, Evandter stalked in.
He was red to the elbows with other peoples’ blood and grinning like a skull. He barely glanced at his two former comrades. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, and there was anticipation writ in every line of him. He’s going to get to her first, Cordiwck realised. He’s going to spirit her away and leave Darien to the Empire.
Then there were soldiers, a squad of eight or so dashing in behind him, and Evandter turned smoothly on his heel, dropping back into a fighting crouch with his spines levelled. In the centre of the newcomers was Colonel Borden himself.
There was a moment’s pause, the soldiers awaiting the order, the Mantis like a drawn bow, ready to loose at any instant.
“I know you,” Borden said. Distant, echoing, were the sounds of fighting, the cries of the injured, but here it was very quiet. “You are Evandter, the murderer, the brigand-king. I have seen your likeness.”
The Mantis sketched a slight bow without breaking his stance.
“They put me here to kill Lowre Darien, the hero,” Borden stated slowly. “Orders are orders, but I’d not want to be the man remembered for that deed. Ridding the world of you, however, is fit matter for a man of honour.” The colonel drew his sword, the one he had lent Tesse for her dance.
Something had soured in Evandter’s face with the Wasp’s words. Even as Borden’s sword cleared its scabbard he was in motion, leaping almost onto their blades’ points. He felled two of them, jagged spines lashing left and right, stingfire flying wide, and then he had carried them backwards, dancing through their midst, and the knot of fighting men swept from the cellar and back the way they had all come.
“On!” decided Tesse, and almost dragged Cordwick the other way. The hall was shorter than they had thought, though, and the room beyond lit only with two low oil lanterns, one hung beside each of the soldiers stationed there. Tesse and Cordwick shrank back but the men had not seen them. Nor had they left their post to investigate the fighting, sounds of which had now almost entirely died away.
Between them, her hands tied before her, was a Dragonfly-kinden woman in the rags of what had once been a very fine robe indeed. Her head was down, a cascade of dark hair hiding her face. Tesse’s hand tightened on Cordwick’s arm.
Even as they were creeping back towards the barrel-filled cellar someone passed them, unheralded and almost silent. Darien.
He did not glance at th
em. His eyes were for Nysse Ceann only. He barely glanced at the two Wasps as their stings flashed at him, as their swords clashed against his own. They were skilled, those two, hand-picked for the job, but he killed them nonetheless and barely noted them.
He spoke the woman’s name, and her head lifted. Cordwick was struck, even in the poor light, by how plainly-writ there was the quality that had captivated Darien and Evandter both.
The prince cut her bonds, kneeling to sever the ropes and then raise her to her feet. Tesse was trembling, clutching at the Beetle’s sleeve, but Cordwick made an abruptly puzzled sound despite himself. “I’d’ve locked her up in one of these cellars, myself,” he muttered philosophically, watching the two Dragonflies together.
And she stabbed him. In a single move, perfect in its power, speed and precision, the woman had rammed a blade hilt-deep under Darien’s armpit. In the moment of shock that followed, she dragged it out and plunged it, two-handed, past his collarbone. Darien’s mouth was wide, head thrown back, and his hands clawed briefly at the air as though trying to out-wrestle fate. He collapsed to his knees without a sound, toppled sideways, from hero to carrion without ever understanding what had befallen him.
Tesse twitched, and Cordwick grappled her, dragging her back, pulling her away and into the room with the barrels. He could feel her trying to scream, her body racked by silent convulsions, her mouth gaping like a drowning woman’s. Cordwick barely got her down behind the barrels before Nysse Ceann had walked in.
But it was not Ceann – or it was in the instant she stepped from the low, dark, hall, but then there was a man there, a Spider-kinden man no less, tearing the rags of a ruined robe from himself to reveal loose-fitting clothes beneath, such as an acrobat or actor might wear. The man’s hair was dark, but not the flowing mane Cordwick knew he had seen, and that face had nothing in it that recalled the prisoner-turned-murdereress. Yet it had been that woman who entered, and this man who now stood in her place.
Cordwick did his best, just then, to find a way to lie to himself about what he had seen, Later still, he would know that he had been mistaken, that wigs and makeup and mumming and poor light had fooled him, but just then he knew it was not so: he had seen what he had seen.
Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1) Page 19
