The Cleaver struck something solid and skidded back a few feet before coming, blessedly, to a stop.
‘There are some soldiers coming over here, in a hurry,’ Che said helpfully. Thalric straightened up and went across to the hatch, slipping back the catches that held it shut. As he pushed it open, the rain drove down hard, but he flashed his wings and pushed himself up on to the barrel-like hull of the Cleaver. There were indeed soldiers coming, a full dozen of them, some on the ground and some in the air, all brandishing spears. He waited patiently for them, feeling the rain soak into his hair, into the arming tunic beneath his mail. As soon as they saw that a Wasp had emerged from the unknown flier their headlong approach slowed a little, and then a sergeant alighted before him, with a salute.
‘Excuse me, sir, we weren’t notified-’
‘You wouldn’t have been,’ Thalric cut him off. ‘I require lodgings for three, an engineer to repair this vehicle, and a meeting as soon as possible with your duty officer. Oh, and round up some doctors. Local ones would be best.’
The sergeant blinked at him. ‘I’ll first have to ask who you are, sir, and what’s your authority.’
And here goes the dice. ‘Captain Manus, sergeant, on my way to Capitas. Rest assured the duty officer will get all the details he needs.’
The sergeant was still not convinced, but in Thalric’s experience they seldom were. Nevertheless the man sent some of his men off to relay Thalric’s requests, which was perhaps as much as could be expected.
‘Good,’ Thalric commented. ‘Now get two of your men inside the flier. I have a casualty that needs to get under cover without delay.’
He dropped back inside ahead of them, confident that the sergeant would follow to keep him in sight, and that he would get his chance to win the man over then and there.
The sergeant and his man came next and stopped short, staring suspiciously at Achaeos and at Che.
‘Is there something wrong, Sergeant?’ Thalric asked sharply.
‘Sir, these are-’
‘Servants of the Empire, Sergeant,’ Thalric said firmly. ‘There is a war on, you may have heard. Some places are no longer safe for servants of the Empire.’ He placed just the right stress on the words because, of course, an officer of the imperial secret service, the dreaded Rekef, would never say it, not straight out, but there were always times when it paid to be recognized for what they really were.
The sergeant was clearly not a stupid man and it was fairly well known how the Rekef Outlander employed agents of all races. Now his hurried salute and his issuing orders to his men provided all the reassurance Thalric needed.
Shortly thereafter, Thalric had Achaeos safely stowed in an infirmary, with some of his Moth-kinden kinsmen staring nervously at him from around the door, and Che sitting at the man’s bedside. By that time Thalric himself was standing before the local Rekef Outlander officer.
The man was another sergeant, and Thalric could not believe his luck. He guessed that Tharn merited the barest minimum of Rekef presence, probably making do with this one man alone. Nobody cared about such backward little places. As far as the Empire was concerned, the garrison here was merely to keep the Moths from bothering Helleron, so the Tharen governor was only a major and the Rekef had better things to do. He would feel ashamed, later, of the way in which he now browbeat the wretched Rekef sergeant, but maybe that aggression was something he had been needing to get out of his system for a long time.
And news travelled fast. After that, when he strode the corridors of Tharn, now lit with hastily cobbled-together gas-lanterns, the locals and the conquerors alike gave him a wide berth, pointing him out to each other as the Rekef’s man. In the shock of relief, he almost forgot that it was not true, and that Che and Achaeos were even there. Instead he went to the suite of rooms he had commandeered, with good-sized windows cut into the outer wall of the mountain, and waited there for the information he had requested. For what else would the Rekef’s man do, after arriving, but receive reports and pick the local intelligencer’s brains?
Che had wanted to stay with Achaeos throughout, but the Moths refused to tend him in her presence, finding that a Beetle-kinden in their halls was more of an insult than any number of Wasps. Only after she had reluctantly withdrawn did his people begin their business with him. The doctors arrived before the inquisitors: administering salves and poultices, chants and charms, two full days of careful ritual and healing skill. By the time the questions started Achaeos was fit enough to raise himself up on one elbow. He was able, at least, to look his questioner in the eye.
She was a Moth of middle-young years with a severe face, and two others came in behind her. One of them was a young scribe with a scroll, and the other a woman bearing a staff, which identified her to Achaeos as a guard, although the Wasps present would not have guessed it. He supposed that the Wasps must have banned the carrying of weapons inside Tharn, but a staff was beneath their notice.
‘I understand you to be a Rekef agent,’ began their leader, with enough questioning in her tone for him to know that he had not been condemned out of hand. The presence of the doctors should already have told him that, but he was taking nothing for granted. Even now he did not know whether it was simply his imagined link to the conquering Empire that protected him from his own people’s wrath.
‘Is that all you understand?’ he asked her. His voice was weak, and he kept it soft, making her strain to hear his words. At this point, words were all he had to fight with.
‘You are Achaeos,’ she noted, ‘you didn’t leave here in glory. In fact you nearly did not leave here at all. During this last year you have progressed from uninspired student to positive maverick – and now here you are.’
He kept his feelings from his face. ‘Is a man not allowed to come home? I may have dallied with exile, but I do not believe a sentence of exile was ever passed.’
She glanced backwards, but not at her companions, so he knew that they were being overheard by another – one of the Skryres he guessed – who might be anywhere in Tharn.
‘There are no Wasps guarding the door,’ she said, ‘so we speak only before our own people. Or at least my own people. Do you really still claim the Moths of Tharn as yours?’
‘I do.’
‘Then you are no Rekef, or Wasp agent.’
‘Well deduced.’
If she felt he was baiting her, she gave no sign of it. They faced each other without expression. ‘Our situation here is currently delicate. We do not wish some agitator appearing in the halls of Tharn, spreading confusion.’
‘You would rather remain slaves?’
‘It takes more than a single glance to truly tell the master from the slave.’
That made him pause. Again she was unreadable but there had been something in her tone, in that simple platitude, to suggest that there was more going on here than he had thought.
He narrowed his eyes as she glanced over her shoulder again. It was a bad habit of hers and there was no need for it. It suggested someone who had spent a long time away from her own people. But where? And the answer was quick to suggest itself. She has been in the Empire, surely. What is going on here?
It was not that she was simply being observed, either. She must be receiving instructions from a Skryre and they did not sit well with her. Her expression was beginning to tell him things.
‘I am Xaraea,’ she announced suddenly.
He held on to that for a moment, feeling his heart leap, for his people did not give up their names easily. It was a sign of status: to know a name gave you power. To be given a name made you at least an equal. That could only mean he had been let into something.
‘What is happening here?’ he asked her.
‘You know much of what passes in the Lowlands?’
‘I know some of it.’
She considered him. ‘You are not strong enough yet to leave your bed.’
‘I am stronger than I was, but no.’
‘But later you wil
l be, and there is someone you must meet.’
He stared at her suspiciously. ‘And who would that be?’
At last her mouth twisted into a slight smile. ‘Who else but our new master, the governor of Tharn?’
Che paused at the doorway of Thalric’s room, suddenly doubting herself. Surely there must be some other option, but they had shooed her out of Achaeos’ sick-room with venomous looks and mutterings about their Hated Enemy.
The corridors of Tharn had never been friendly, save when Achaeos had been beside her. Even with her Art-given sight, which could pierce the darkness the Moths habitually lived in, it was a world of hostile gazes, pointedly turned backs, and lantern-bearing Wasp soldiers who stared suspiciously at her. It was enough to make her wish she could not see it all.
She had spent some time at an exterior window, watching the rain lash down over the landing strip where the Cleaver was almost lost amongst a dozen imperial flying machines. The rain had made her unhappy. She had found herself yearning to fly, as she had done for the first time, when last she was here.
And so here she was, hand poised to knock on… what? The Moths had few doors, only arches and more arches, so that every room was part of a labyrinth of chambers that went back and back further into the mountain, all of them as chill as the weather outside. What doors they had were hidden screens and secret panels in the stone, which no stranger would guess were there. The Moths never seemed to notice the cold either, these strange people who otherwise seemed so frail. She had seen imperial soldiers well wrapped up in scarves and greatcoats, their breath steaming as they complained to each other, whilst Moth servants padded past them in light tunics and sandals.
She heard a shuffling noise from inside, a shadow cast over the shifting light that spilled out of the room, and there he was in the doorway: Thalric, in his banded armour still, a Wasp amongst his own people once more.
This was a mistake, she decided. The strange thing was that he seemed to think so, too. His expression, on finding her there, was bitter, almost resigned.
‘What?’ she asked him instinctively.
‘Forgive me, it is you who appear to have sought me out,’ he said, stepping back. She could feel the warmth inside, a fire lit to complement no fewer than four lanterns: a little corner of the Empire staked out against this foreign darkness.
‘I… wanted to talk to someone, anyone,’ she said. ‘And the Moths don’t like me, and I can’t be beside Achaeos, and I don’t care for Wasps.’
He raised an eyebrow at that, and she scowled at him. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘I do.’ He returned to his desk, where he had been sifting through papers, dozens of them, some rolled up and bound, some held open with polished stones. ‘Should I be flattered by that?’
‘I can go, if you prefer,’ she said, and he was on his feet again, a strange expression on his face.
Is he lonely? But it was not that. Instead it as the expression of a man with news, who needed to tell someone. Anyone. We are well met, it appears.
‘What is it?’ she asked, sweeping some papers off a bench and taking a seat. It seemed strange to be taking the initiative with him, strange to find him appearing so shaken, here amongst his own people.
‘What made you come here, now?’ he asked, but it was a rhetorical question. ‘Cheerwell Maker, how is it that you have not yet got yourself killed? You have absolutely no sense of place or time. You just go blundering in wherever you please like… like a Beetle. I caught you that way in Helleron, and General Malkan caught you after the Battle of the Rails. You only narrowly escaped Solarno, from what I hear, so why are you still amongst the living?’
She could not decide whether he was truly angry, and it seemed neither could he. His words made her think, though, and made her feel sad.
‘I’m not short of injured friends,’ she admitted. ‘Perhaps I’m just bad luck for others.’
‘A carrier of it, then, that never feels the ill effects,’ he said. ‘Cheerwell?’
‘Call me Che.’
He blinked at her.
‘If you’re going to call me anything more familiar than “Mistress Maker”, call me Che. Because you cannot imagine the burden of going through life with a name like Cheerwell.’
For a long moment he just stared at her, then, uncontrollably, the corner of his mouth quirked upwards. ‘I suppose I can’t,’ he conceded.
‘Thalric…’ she started, then stopped and considered. ‘Thalric. I see you’ve found a niche here. If Achaeos gets healed, and he and I leave Tharn… there’s nothing to stop you staying behind.’
The smile was gone, the tentative anger along with it. ‘Nothing except my own people.’ At last he sat down again, one hand idly knocking a few scrolls from the desk. ‘I have a death sentence, Cheer… Che. Che, then. Eventually, quite soon even, I’m bound to meet someone who knows me. Someone from the Rekef, someone from the army, just… someone. I have tried, I won’t deny it, to find my way back to them.’ His new smile was composed only of bitterness. ‘I tried that in Jerez. I tried to sell the Mantis and the others. I tried to be loyal to the Empire. But the Empire didn’t want my loyalty. The man I approached recognized me and tried to kill me. That could have happened here. It still might with every new arrival, or perhaps somewhere in the garrison here is a hidden Rekef Inlander agent who, any day now, will look on “Major Manus” and think the name Thalric. Do you know what I really am, Che?’
She shook her head wordlessly.
‘I am a spymaster, a major in the Rekef Outlander. An imperial intelligencer, that is what I’ve spent my life being. Only now they won’t let me. And I was good, very good, at my job. I’ve been sorting through all these reports, and thinking: “I must tell them this,” or “the next step should be that,” and realizing that I can’t. I cannot tell them anything and, even if I could, they would not thank me. Instead they would have me on crossed pikes. I cannot use my skills on behalf of my Empire any more, so I’ve been sitting here torturing myself with my pretending.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She expected him to sneer at that, but he nodded soberly. ‘You probably are, at that. However did you get yourself mixed up in all of this?’
‘I am Stenwold’s niece.’
He looked back at the desk, the papers, and she knew better than to interrupt him. Some train of thought was now running its course in his mind, some weighty decision that had been weighed up delicately before she came in.
‘Szar is in revolt,’ he said at last.
‘I don’t-’
‘The city of Szar is in open revolt against the Empire,’ he told her. ‘Thousands of soldiers are therefore being diverted to put down the Bee-kinden with extreme force. Many of them are soldiers that would otherwise be heading west even now.’
She nodded slowly. Her mind’s map was hazy on precisely where Szar was, but she appreciated the point he made.
Thalric took a deep breath. ‘The city of Myna, of fond memory, is on the point of insurrection as well.’
‘Myna? That’s Kymene-’
‘Yes, it is. Myna teeters. The garrison has been weakened, with troops heading north-west for Szar. Still, the Empire has an iron hold on the city. So, do the Mynans risk everything with another upheaval?’
‘What are you saying?’ she asked, because it was obvious that something else lay hidden behind his words.
‘I am saying,’ he said slowly, the words forcing themselves out of him, ‘that if some agents of the Lowlands were to find their way to Myna, and there tell the Mynans that they are not alone, that the Lowlands struggled too, and Szar, and Solarno, that the imperial forces were stretching themselves thinner every day, then they would surely rise up where otherwise they might not dare.’
She stood up slowly. ‘You’re suggesting that… what? I? We? We? Achaeos can’t possibly travel.’
‘Achaeos is at least safe here amongst his own people,’ Thalric said. ‘But yes, we could fly to Myna in that ridiculous barrel
of yours and stir up the pot. Because, if there’s nothing else on this world I can still do, I can play conspiracy with the best of them, and whilst the Mynans won’t ever trust me, they might trust you.’
‘I don’t want to leave Achaeos…’ But already the idea was growing on her. ‘I’ll have to speak with him,’ she ended lamely.
‘Of course,’ said Thalric. ‘But soon, as we must be swift. If the Mynans delay until after Szar is put down, it will all be for nothing.’
‘I will speak to him. Yes, I’ll speak to him now,’ she said, already reaching the doorway of the room. She looked back at him once, and he wondered what she saw there: someone almost an ally, or just a burnt-out Wasp spymaster?
But I still possess the craft. Indeed I cannot keep it from working. He was betraying the Empire every moment, with every breath, and yet he could look in the mirror and betray Stenwold Maker just as easily. I have now found my vocation. I have more faces than shape-changer Scyla ever had.
Eight
There had been a day and a night of sheer panic, as the fragile form of the Buoyant Maiden was hurled back and forth by storm winds the like of which Stenwold had never known. He had now been given a full chance to get acquainted, though. As the only Apt passenger, it had fallen to him to remain on deck with Jons Allanbridge, tying off lines, strengthening stays, doing what little could be done to stop the little airship simply flying apart, or the gondola parting company with the balloon and the machine ceasing to be anything but a collection of airborne detritus.
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