He gave himself a mental shake. ‘Why?’ he asked, re-focusing.
‘Because for one, my people are good at reading truth and falsehood, and I believe that when you’re up before us students telling us all this, you are sincere, that you know what you’re talking about. Since you left for wherever you went, we’ve all had a chance to see the Wasp-kinden at large in Collegium. Oh, they’re on their best behaviour and they’ve always got gold ready to pay for breakages, but they’re. ugly, do you know what I mean? Not physically, but something inside them. And the way they brawl. A little drink and a harsh word, and they’ll fight to kill. I know one student of the College who was killed in a taverna, only the Wasp officers paid out gold to keep it quiet. And they’re all trained soldiers, which is just what you said, too. Every one of them, even the artificers, even the diplomats who speak to the Assembly.’
‘Arianna. you Spider-kinden have never cared much what wars have racked the Lowlands,’ Stenwold said. ‘So why-?’
‘You think I’m here on behalf of my people?’ she asked him incredulously. ‘You think I’m some agent of the Aristoi? That. that would be grand, Master Maker.’ Bitterness was rife in her tone now. ‘But I’m not Aristoi. I’m of no great family to help me get anywhere in the world. I’m the last daughter of a dead house, and all we had left went to pay my way into the College. This is my home, Master Maker. The College is all I have. And you, to me you are the College.’
In the face of all that solemn youth, he could only swallow and stare.
‘Most of the Masters just get lost in their own disciplines, Master Maker. Stenwold. May I.?’
He found that he had nodded.
‘They don’t care, you see, what happens elsewhere. And some others are worse, lots of the ones in the Assembly, they look only to their pockets and their social station, and little else. I’ve seen enough of that snobbery in Everis where I grew up. But everyone knows it’s you who has gone out there and seen the world. And you’ve come back with a warning, and nobody is listening to you. But a lot of us students do. Master. Stenwold. I want to help you.’
‘How?’ he asked. Suddenly the words were difficult to reach for. ‘What do you. how can you help me?’
She moistened her lips with her tongue, abruptly nervous. ‘I. I hear things, see things. I learned to stay out of the way, back home, so I’m good at not being seen. You. that was one reason I came through your window like that. So that you’d see. so you’d know.’
‘I understand,’ he said, thinking, One reason? And what are the others? He did not want to involve this young girl in what was about to happen and yet she was so desperate to help, and if he now said no? Why, she would surely go off and do something rash on her own, just to prove herself to him. Just as Cheerwell would have done, doubtless.
And he could use her, certainly.
She reached out and put a hand on his, a touch that dried his throat suddenly.
‘Please,’ she said, and he found that he could not refuse.
‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it!’ Cheerwell exclaimed. ‘I don’t often get the chance to travel by rails.’ She had taken the bench end closest to the open window, watching the dusty countryside pass by, feeling the wind blast at her face. The rumble of the automotive’s steam engine tremored through every fibre of her being. Out there, craning forward to peer along the carriage’s length, she could see the duns and sand-colours of the land turning into the green marshes that surrounded Lake Sideriti, whose eastern edge the rail line would skirt, posted up on pillars to keep it clear of the boggy ground.
Achaeos huddled beside her, wrapped in his cloak and looking ill. It was the smell of the automotive, or the motion, or all of it. This was not a way that Moths travelled comfortably, and he could not even fly alongside. The carriage had no ceiling, just an awning to cover the seats in case of rain, but the steam automotive made such pace that if Achaeos went aloft he would get swept away, left behind.
Beneath her feet, through the slatted floor, Che could see the ever-turning steel wheels strike occasional sparks along the rails, and the ground in between hurrying past in a constant blur. This truly was the travel of the future, she decided, and even though Achaeos disliked it so much, they would reach Sarn in two days. Even Fly messengers took the rail these days to retain their boasted speed of delivery.
On the bench in front of them Sperra slept fitfully, leaning against the carriage wall. Che had carefully shuttered that part of the window closest to her, in case the little Fly-kinden should stir in her sleep and just pitch straight out of it. She was still not entirely recovered from her injuries at Helleron, poor woman, but it had been her decision to join Scuto in his journey to Collegium. The Thorn Bug himself was off inspecting the engine, Che gathered. He might be an agent in Stenwold’s spy army but he remained an artificer first and foremost.
Of course that made her think of Totho, and she suddenly found no pleasure either in the journey or the machine that transported them.
Poor Totho, who had left them for the war at Tark for one reason only. She herself had never fully told Stenwold the truth, although he had probably guessed most of it. Only Achaeos and she knew with utter certainty. Totho had left them because he could not bear to be with her without having her affection. For that reason he had come all the way from Collegium to Helleron with her. He had come to rescue her from the Wasps, travelled into the Empire itself, for no other cause, and she had never seen it because she had never looked. There had been Salma to worry about. There had been Achaeos, too, who had become bound to her by forces she could not explain, and who she loved.
Poor Totho had fallen between the slats of her life and only in his misplaced farewell letter had he been recalled to her guilty attention.
She had told him casually, You are like a brother, and she, who had experienced her share of rejections and even derision, knew just what that felt like. Yet how easily the words had slipped out from her.
There had been no word yet from Tark. That the siege had started seemed clear, but Totho and Salma should have kept a safe distance away, watching the moves of Ant and Wasp like a chess match. Yet they should have been able to send word somehow. Which meant that something had gone wrong, and poor clumsy Totho, who had never been able to look after himself, not really, was there in the middle of it.
She put her arm round Achaeos, and hugged him to her. His blank eyes peered at her from beneath his hood.
‘You’re thinking about him again,’ he noted.
‘I am, yes.’
‘No doubt we will find word from him when we return,’ he said weakly. Sickened by their method of travel, he was not in much of a position to offer comfort.
The first margin of Lake Sideriti was passing them by now. The water was stained a bright turquoise by the sun and the plants that lived in it, as though beneath the surface was a great blue jewel that caught and reflected the light. Even Achaeos perked up somewhat at that sight.
‘They don’t make ’em any more like this old girl!’ came Scuto’s voice as he rejoined them, pushing his way down the carriage’s length to the amazement and disgust of the other passengers. He had his cloak flung mostly back, so the full spiky grotesquerie of his face and hunched body was there for anyone jaded enough to want to peruse it. Even his garments only emphasized the lumpy form beneath them, torn in a hundred places by his hooked spines. ‘I ain’t never had a chance before to see one of these up close and working.’
‘Scuto,’ she said, but he had seen the radiance of the lake, dotted with reed islands, that stretched virtually from their window to the horizon.
‘Well if that don’t beat the lot of ’em,’ he murmured, sitting down beside Sperra. She shifted sleepily, jabbed herself on his spines and woke with a start.
‘Wretched spickly bastard,’ she muttered, stretching and thus pricking herself again with a curse. ‘Are we there yet?’
‘Look,’ Che gestured, and the Fly glanced over the lake without much interest.
/> ‘Lovely. Can I go back to sleep now?’
‘You got no heart,’ Scuto told her.
‘You can tell that, can you?’ She rubbed her arm where he had pricked her. ‘You’re a wretched nail-studded menace, that’s what you are.’
Cheerwell knew very little about her, other than she had worked for Scuto for years now. She was no artificer, but she was Apt and a good hand with a crossbow. She had some doctoring skills as well and a bag of salves and bandages, and so she must have trained a little. Fly-kinden got everywhere in the Lowlands and did all manner of work, legal or not, but Che realized that she had never really got to know one well. They tended to keep to their own kind and stay out of the way of larger folk. Sperra was about typical of her race: standing a few inches under four feet in her sandals, with a lean, spare frame. She kept her hair quite long but tied behind her, and she wore dark, unassuming clothes without any finery or ornament. Everyone claimed that Flies liked valuables, preferably those belonging to others. Whether they wore them openly in their own communities of Egel or Merro to the east, she did not know, but she could never recall seeing a Fly-kinden flaunting any such treasures.
To the east. Of course, if Tark fell, then Egel and Merro, those two Fly-kinden warrens in the Merraian hills, would lie in the path of the encroaching army. Would they merely hide in their homes? Would they take up what they could carry and flee? They were no fighters, certainly not before an army of such magnitude. She wondered whether this thought was at the back of Sperra’s mind too.
We are all at risk here: Achaeos’s people, Sperra’s and mine. Even Tisamon’s precious Mantis-kinden cannot stay apart from this.
The sun was lowering in the sky and the gleam of Lake Sideriti grew duller, the beautiful allure of its waters dimming and dimming as the night loomed in the eastern sky.
Seven
They called Capitas the City of Gold, but it was only at dawn that the name struck true. The tawny stone it was built from, which had gnawed up quarry after quarry in the hillsides to the north, took that moment’s morning light and glowed with it. After that it was just stone.
This artificial flower of the Empire was young enough that old men could remember when the river wound untroubled past the hills and the homes of herdsmen. Alvdan’s father had planned the city and seen most of it built before his death. Alvdan himself had let the architects and craftsmen follow the same plans, another binding promise he had inherited from his father’s reign. Even now, if he chose to look for it, he would see scaffolding where the Ninth Army barracks were still being constructed.
But he liked the place at dawn. Now here he was, breakfasting on his balcony and looking down the stepped levels of the great palace and over the elite of his subjects. Capitas was a place that could never have grown naturally. The land was insufficient to support it. It was the heart of Empire, though, and the taxes and war plunder of the Wasp-kinden flowed relentlessly to it. If they did not then the Rekef would soon ask why.
The Emperor was breaking his fast in company today. Often he dined with concubines, sometimes generals or advisers that he wished to favour. Once in a tenday, though, he made a point of sending for his sister. She was installed in a palace of her own across the city that was as much a padded prison as anything else. He knew that to arrive here on time for a dawn breakfast she would be roused from her bed not long after midnight. After all, the daughter of the Empire must be correctly dressed and perfumed and painted.
As Emperor he took his victories where he wanted, so here she was.
They sat at a table, almost within reach of one another, and servants scuttled to serve them with seedcakes and new-baked bread and warm honeydew. The city beyond was waking up, a hundred dashes of glitter showing his subjects taking to the air. None of the airborne would approach the palace, of course. There were guards enough on the tier above them who would shoot any intruder without question.
And one more guard, of course, to stand uncomfortably close behind his sister, to remind her of her situation.
‘Your name came up in council again,’ he remarked, sipping his honeydew. He seemed all ease here, slouching in his chair, smiling at the servants. She, on the other hand, sat with a spear-straight back, eating little and delicately. Eight years his junior, barely a woman, she had been living in fear now for half her life.
‘General Maxin wishes, I think, to be remembered to you.’
He was adept at reading her. Now, seeing her lips tighten, he broadened his own smile. There was a name she was unlikely to forget. Three brothers and a sister that had separated the two of them in age had all fallen, if not to Maxin’s knife then to his orders.
‘I am sure,’ she said, ‘that I am grateful to the general for his concern.’
He laughed politely. ‘Dear sister Seda, they are all so anxious that you find some direction in your life.’
‘I am touched.’ Seda took a minute bite of seedcake, her eyes never leaving his hands, watching for any signal to the guard hovering behind her. ‘Although I can guess at the direction they have in mind.’
‘They don’t understand how it is between us,’ Alvdan continued. A servant brought him more bread and buttered it for him.
‘I am not sure that I do, Alvdan.’ She sensed the guard shift behind her and added, ‘Your Imperial Majesty.’
‘They think I am so soft-hearted. They agonize over it, that the Emperor of the Wasps should have such a flaw in his character,’ he told her.
‘Then you are right that they clearly do not understand you.’
‘Insolence, sister Seda, does not become one of our line,’ he warned her.
She lowered her head but her eyes stayed with his hands.
‘You and I understand each other, do we not?’ he pressed.
‘We do. Your Majesty.’
‘Tell me,’ he said. She glanced up at him, and he repeated, ‘Tell me. I love to hear the words from you.’
For a second she looked rebellious, but it passed like the weather. ‘You hate and despise me, Majesty. Your joy is in my misery.’
‘And an Emperor deserves all joys in life, does he not,’ he agreed happily. ‘My advisers and their plans! They do not understand your potential. Last year they were plotting to marry you off, to make an honest wife of you. They do not realize that you are not like other women of our race. You are no mere adornment for some man. You are a weapon, and if your hilt were in a man’s hand he would turn your edge on me. I think General Maxin would marry you himself, if I was mad enough to let him.’
She said something quietly, and he rapped his knife-hilt on the table impatiently.
‘I said I would rather die, Your Majesty,’ she answered him.
He smiled broadly at that. ‘Well then perhaps I should hold the option open. I can always have Maxin slain on his nuptial night. That would be a fit wedding present, no?’
‘Your Majesty forgets who he most wishes to hurt,’ she said tiredly.
‘Perhaps. But now they are trying to parcel you off to some order, so as to make an ascetic of you. As though you could not be recalled from there, once my back was turned. And that is the crux. Alive, you will always threaten me. Yet dead. My throne will always require defending and, with your blood staining my hands, who can say from where the next threat might come? So, alive and close you must stay, little sister.’
‘You will keep me only until the succession is secured, Majesty, and then you will have me killed. Perhaps you will even wield the knife yourself, or break me in the interrogation rooms.’
‘Do you tire of life, Seda?’ he asked her.
She reached out for him, then, but the cold steel of the guard’s sword touched her cheek before she could touch even his fingers. With a long sigh she drew back.
‘I have had no life since our father died. What I have had since then is nothing more than a long descent, and every tenday the ground is moved one tenday further off, so that I drop and drop. But one day the ground will stay where it is, and I shall
be dashed to pieces.’
‘Beautifully said,’ he told her. ‘Your education has not been wasted after all. Seeing the good use you have made of it, I decide that I shall broaden it.’
This was a change from the usual routine. ‘Your Imperial Majesty?’ she enquired cautiously.
‘A little trip to the dungeons, dear Seda,’ he said and, when she sighed, he added, ‘Not yet, dear sister. It is not your turn yet. Instead there is a most interesting prisoner that General Maxin has brought for me. I think you should see him. Furthermore, I think he is desirous of seeing you.’
The Wasp Empire was all about imposing order. Alvdan the Second’s grandfather Alvric had forced it on his own people, who were a turbulent and savage lot by nature. The original Alvdan, first of that name, had then turned his need for order on the wider world and his namesake son had followed his lead. The imposition of order became all. The multiplicity of ranks and stations within the army, the precise status of the more powerful families, the honours and titles that were the gift of the throne, even the station and privileges of individual slaves — everyone had a place, and those above, and those below.
The maxim applied even to prisoners. There had developed a whole imperial art to the treatment of prisoners — how often they were fed; whether they had a cell a man could stand in, or even lie straight in; whether they were kept damp, kept cold; whether they were dragged out to lie on the artificer-interrogator’s mechanical tables for no other reason than it was their turn, their lowly contribution to the Empire’s sense of order.
Such prisoners as had something to offer the Empire, they could do well for themselves. They could even make the leap, eventually, from prisoner to slave — just as the threat of becoming a prisoner kept the lowest slaves in line.
Judging by such exacting standards, this man her brother had found must have a great deal of potential, for his cell lay on the airiest level of Capitas’s most accommodating prison. He had two rooms to himself, and an antechamber, and the guards even rattled the barred door in advance to announce that he had visitors. In the antechamber there sat three young pages, two boys and a girl, presumably to run errands for the prisoner’s needs. As she considered that, Princess Seda noticed how pale and drawn they all were, and that one was visibly trembling.
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