He stared at Leadswell in a colder light. Make an example of him, maybe? But the crowd was still unruly, if not quite rebellious, and there was such a thing as pushing your luck.
‘Eujen!’ A halfbreed woman from the crowd came shouldering forwards, almost barging into the sergeant. She was still in uniform, Coldstone Company again, and for a moment Helmess thought that everything might ignite there and then, as the sergeant shoved her backwards.
‘Straessa, peace,’ Leadswell was saying, even though Helmess was willing for him to incite his own execution. ‘It’s going to be fine.’
There was a garbled exclamation to the contrary from the reeling artist Mummers, and the halfbreed woman – the Antspider, is it? – looked as though she was going to attempt something unwise. Then Leadswell said something more, and she backed off reluctantly.
Ah, shame.
‘Now, Master Gripshod, I see there.’ Helmess mentally washed his hands of the altercation and turned to more important matters. ‘I take you for the senior hand here, so why don’t you arrange to go and bring me out Stenwold Maker.’
The old historian Gripshod retained a creditable card-player’s face, but the ripple of anger and shock passing among the rest of the students betrayed him. Yes, Maker was here. Yes, they all knew it.
Even so, Gripshod raised his head and declared, bold-facedly, ‘The War Master has surely fled the city, Master Broiler.’
‘Master Speaker, you’ll address me as,’ Helmess replied venomously. ‘Or Major Broiler if you prefer, Master Gripshod. And I know full well that Maker’s here and, given that you’re already marked as his accomplice, I’ll ask again that you have him brought out. Or else I’ll have you executed right here and now for resisting the Empire’s authority.’
There were two snapbows already levelled at Gripshod, and those closest to the old man began shuffling aside, staring at him, staring at the Wasps.
‘It’s true, Maker’s not here,’ Leadswell protested, whereupon the sergeant backhanded him across the face, viciously hard yet utterly impersonally, as though this was some habitual gesture of his that he had no real control over. Helmess noticed the sudden surge of students towards their captive leader – just a minor ripple in the crowd, but the situation was clearly becoming undisciplined.
‘Very well,’ he proceeded. ‘Master Gripshod, kindly fetch me my old friend Stenwold Maker at once, or I’ll have Leadswell here executed. How about that? I’ll give you a slow count of ten to allow you to make your choice.’ And either way I win, I think. And if I do get Maker now, Leadswell can have a tragic accident at some other time. And then occurred a blink: a sudden disconnection between the world as Helmess knew it to be and what his eyes were seeing. Why does that student have a snapbow?
There was a general motion now in the crowd, and it was not the vacillating of a confused and unhappy mob. It was military.
His eyes kept alighting on the glint of steel: barrels, air-batteries, swords.
‘Sergeant,’ he hissed. ‘The Student Company was disarmed along with the rest, wasn’t it?’
The sergeant’s head snapped round to reveal an expression entirely blank. ‘What’s a Student Company, sir?’
In Helmess’s mind there rapidly coalesced a possible train of events, a series of communications between agents and the army, detailing Collegium’s strength, and then the order coming back to disarm the Companies. Which Companies? The Merchant Companies, of course.
Because students were students, and soldiers were soldiers, and really, with their entire male population pressed into the army, what an ironic slip it was for some Wasp to make.
That was a broken second’s worth of thought, as the soldiers around him caught sight the same weapons, but they were not sure what his orders were. The sergeant was staring at him, perhaps coming to the same abysmal conclusion, and—
Half the sergeant’s head was suddenly gone, a fist of blood and broken bone leaping from the cavity that was left, and the shooting started. Helmess dropped to his knees, hands over his head, hearing shouts and screams – but all of it so brief, so brief. The dozen men he had brought along were horribly outmatched from the start, and by mere students! Even as they tried to discharge their own snapbows they were cut down, and then the Dragonfly vaulted straight over him, ending up on the wall and shooting down at the two sentries even as they burst in to see what was going on, one arrow piercing straight down alongside the collar of each man’s armour, loosed almost faster than Helmess could register.
In moments, only moments, Helmess was cowering alone before that great angry host of the young.
‘Who shot?’ Eujen demanded. And then, because the question was plainly twenty snapbow bolts too late, he amended it to, ‘Who loosed first?’
A terrible silence had otherwise fallen now that the Wasps were dead. The mood of the mob tilted between feeling aghast at what they had done to being fully determined to do more.
One man pushed his way forwards, his eyes locked on Eujen. Pale among the Beetle majority, he was an alien that fate had surely never intended to be standing there, not in that uniform and with a Collegiate snapbow in his hand.
‘Averic,’ Eujen identified him.
‘I couldn’t let them take you,’ the Wasp said flatly. There was a great deal of emotion in his voice, but none of it suggested regret. ‘I know what they’d do to you.’
‘You couldn’t—’ Eujen started, but Mummers broke in.
‘They’d have picked you apart, man! And what about the War Master?’ the artist slurred.
‘Since when were you such an admirer of Stenwold Maker?’ Eujen demanded of him.
‘But he’s right,’ old Berjek Gripshod put in. ‘So what now?’
Why are they all staring at me? was Eujen’s only thought. But he wore the sash still, chief officer’s badge and all, and something iron and businesslike descended like a gate inside his mind. ‘How many hurt on our side?’
‘Peddic Gorseway and Laina Mowwell are dead,’ reported Sartaea te Mosca promptly. ‘Four injured beyond that – one seriously.’
‘Get them to the infirmary,’ Eujen ordered. Yes, ordered. That was the word for it. ‘Get . . . there’s a Student Company armoury in the blue dormitory. Anyone who’s with us, wherever the pits we’re going, and wants a snapbow and bolts, go get them.’ Then: ‘Straessa?’ For of course, the Coldstone Company had been disarmed just like all the regulars.
‘Oh, count on me, Chief,’ the Antspider told him, already turning to go. Gerethwy threw Eujen a nod of affirmation as he followed at her heels.
‘Anyone who wants to have not been here can go now,’ Eujen told the assembly. ‘And I mean that. We’ve a short breathing space before the Wasps come to investigate.’ He gave a nod of acknowledgement towards Castre Gorenn, who had been quick to cut off any chance of the alarm getting out. ‘But they’ll be here soon enough, and this could go any number of ways. None of you asked to be party to this, so go now, and I only ask you keep your mouths shut.’
And some went, only a handful, with averted eyes and muttered apologies, but he would remember just how few they were, remember this with bafflement and pride for the rest of his life.
‘Get the Wasp dead taken away . . . one of the cold rooms in the cellars should do. Officers, I want people stationed at every window.’ The old Moth architecture rose above them, built at the command of a race who thought in terms of entry by air, and therefore how best to deny it. There were a handful of balconies and windows big enough to be forced by determined opposition, but not so many, and not so hard to hold. ‘I want a few fast fliers up on the courtyard wall, to keep watch and let us know the moment things turn bad.’ Castre Gorenn, already in position, signalled her approval, and a couple of Fly-kinden were already winging up to join her.
‘And as for me,’ Eujen finished, ‘I need to speak to Stenwold Maker.’
‘And what about this turncoat here?’ Raullo Mummers demanded, and Eujen followed the direction of his finger
to see Helmess Broiler slowly uncurling, his eyes on the weapons of the students around him.
‘Now listen,’ the new Speaker of the Assembly said. ‘You’ve all just signed your death warrants, you must know that – unless I somehow plead mitigation to the general on your behalf. If you want to get out of this with anything, then you have to listen to me very carefully and do everything I say.’
He was standing up, hands held out for calm, and that damnable smile creeping back on to his face, not a sign that he saw the bodies around him, the soldiers who had died in his defence. Eujen, mildest of men, who had spent the last however many years preaching peace to a world on the brink of war, felt that gate in his mind lock tight. If I had to choose between you and the Empress, to speak on my behalf, then I’d place my faith in her before I ’d trust it to you.
‘Averic,’ he said. ‘We have all seen just how Speakers of the Assembly are served by the new administration.’ He could not believe it was his voice, saying such things, but the words came out regardless. ‘Find some room with a sufficiently robust ceiling, and serve Master Broiler just the same.’
Thirty-Four
‘We’re at the crossroads of history, you know?’ Tactician Milus remarked softly. It was dark here, in the cell, but he knew her eyes were better than his for such gloom, just like the Fly she resembled. ‘The Empire . . . it’s like some new treatment for a formerly incurable disease. Either it kills us, or . . . or our future becomes something . . . different.’
There was a single high window, just a handful of inches across and set at what was ground level outside. The grey light filtering through it was continually crossed and recrossed by shadows as people moved past, all of them at a smart pace. Sarn was mobilizing, and if Milus let his mind out, he would feel it, the immaculate perfection that was an Ant city-state going to war. But he chose not to. His plans made, his orders given, he permitted himself to sit down here with his prisoner, only to be disturbed if some lightning move of the Empire broke through the confines of his expectations.
He could feel the woman who called herself Lissart staring at him and, if he deigned to glance her way, perhaps he would see the light glinting in her eyes. She was well secured – a dangerous creature, for sure, because of the Art she could call upon. Valuable, though. Precious, even.
‘But your city is strength eternal, surely,’ she whispered. ‘What possible disease could the Wasps be coming to cure?’
He chuckled indulgently. Because here he could talk rather than just share thoughts that ceased to be his in the moment of their thinking. Here he could say words and get a reaction, and hear words that originated from outside, from another, separate mind. And if the result of those words was that she was sent back to the questioners, to be reminded of their deal, then so be it. They both knew the game by now.
‘Stagnation is the disease that kills cities. It’s killed Tark and Kes, and came close to killing Vek. Collegium saved us once, although they hardly meant to, by teaching us their ways: no slaves, tolerance of foreigners, and of course the tide of trade and technology that comes gushing in once you open your doors to Beetles. There must have been a lot of resistance at the time, but the queen back then was truly a visionary. Change and growth: just what the Ant-kinden city-states of the Lowlands haven’t experienced for centuries. We’ve sat and fought each other, without any great gain or loss, and we’ve been in a rut, ground deeper and deeper year to year. And now the Empire. Thanks to Collegium enlivening us a generation ago, we have a chance. And if we can beat the Eighth back, then . . .’
‘Then what? What do you imagine you’ll achieve, even if you can? Which you won’t,’ she hissed, but he let her have her little tantrums: it made her easier to work for information. These days she hardly needed encouragement.
Once the interrogators had confirmed that there seemed to be no practical upper limit to her tolerance for heat, it would have been down to the knives and the rack, under normal circumstances. A shame, Milus had thought. Ruin someone irrevocably and you start the sands running on their usefulness as a resource,
Collegium had come to the rescue once again, though. Their clever academics had long before devised a way to make things cold, so as to assist them in their researches, and Sarnesh artificers had been able to apply this to the case in hand. Milus supposed that what they had ended up with was the reverse of a branding iron, but with the additional advantage that, no matter how excruciating the pain it inflicted, the icy blue-white marks it traced about the woman’s body faded after a tenday or so, leaving a blank slate for further inscription.
He had not been given much time, what with his principal work devoted to slowing the Eighth Army’s advance as much as possible, but he had been present when they had first broken her, searing coldly through her remarkable reserves of strength and leaving her twitching and sobbing, begging for release.
Then had come the questions, with the machine ever on hand to remind her to tell the truth. But then again, how else were Ant-kinden to have any chance of believing a hostile outsider?
‘I’ll have to leave you,’ he told her. ‘It won’t be for long.’
‘I’ll be waiting for you.’ He liked the fact that at least a ghost of her defiance came back to her so readily. It was the reason he came down here to talk to her on the rare occasions the war could spare him. And he knew he could crack her wide open just by bringing the machine back, just by letting her look at it. Such was the game they played.
She had not known much about the Eighth Army itself, but there was no reason why she should. He already knew she had been stationed in Solarno, a different operation altogether. In fact she turned out to know relatively little even about the Second Army that had set off from there – and only from her time spent hiding amongst them.
But she had been questioned for hour after long hour about Imperial Intelligence: everything she knew about their methods, their agents, their means of communication. She had not understood at first, because – like so many – she had not realized the scope of Milus’s ambitions, which were the ambitions of Sarn itself.
Milus was planning for the battle against the Eighth, certainly, but more than that he was planning for a war against the Empire, and he intended to take that all way to the gates of Capitas itself.
If Thalric had been plunged into this place during the last war, as the man he had then been – the hard-minded Rekef killer – he would surely have broken before now. It was the greatest expression of his not being the same man, that he could be surrounded by so much smoke and shadow, so little that made sense, and retain his mind intact. Not easy, no, but his world had been sliding away from the rational and the sane for long enough that he could keep his balance on the slope. Seda and her unwholesome appetites; the catacombs beneath Khanaphes; the Commonweal; Che.
That had been his first glimpse of Argastos but he had not doubted for a moment who the man was. The warlike Moth-kinden had appeared there without warning; just as suddenly he was gone, and where the gloom-hung wall had stood behind him, now there was a ragged, shroud-hung corridor that they were plainly intended to walk along. Thalric’s disbelief was in suspension, awaiting some more stable time when he might make use of it to begin covering over these memories and restoring his world view, but for now he was deep in the nightmare and clinging on.
And Seda. There had been a shock he was not prepared for. The woman he had fought so hard to get clear of, and who he had irrevocably made his enemy when he threw his lot in with Che, and yet he had not been able to kill her when given the chance, and now here she was again.
When she had found him, in this dark, shifting place. When she had found him, not Che, he had been ready for the explosion, the lash of vengeance. In the time since he had left her, surely the rapacious Empress would have driven out any sign of the girl he once knew, that fading spark in Seda’s eyes that had spoken of when she had been vulnerable, merely a pawn of her brother.
But she was still there, that girl. Her ex
pression, when she found him, had been fond. There had been no recriminations, and for a moment he had been about to go to her as though he had never left, as though she had never become the creature she now was. The traitor thought had been there in his mind: How simple life would have been if only . . .
For all that he had bitten it back, fought it down, it was there still. He had lived a long time as a servant of the Empire, and here was the Empire itself in human form.
He was therefore very glad when Che had turned up soon afterwards. Seeing the Beetle girl, almost absurd in her lack of the majesty and threat that practically radiated from Seda, grounded him back in reality, reminded him where his loyalties – and his affection – now lay.
‘Who’s that?’ Seda demanded sharply, and Thalric snapped back to the here and now. They had been making a cautious progress through the tunnel that Argastos had revealed, but now there was someone ahead of them, plainly visible despite the darkness, as though a lamp were shining only on her.
‘Is that . . .?’ Tynisa murmured.
‘Mistress Bartrer?’ Che exclaimed.
Thalric looked again. Was it? He realized he had not paid much attention to the academic, but this apparition did seem to bear her face. She had shed her Collegiate robes, though, and was wearing something simpler but of an antique cut, a long sleeveless brown tunic, ornamented with delicate black stitching at every edge. There was also some lavish piece of gold at her throat, perhaps a torc.
Not a torc: a collar.
‘I’ve seen depictions of clothes like that in old books,’ Che said softly. ‘Slaves’ garments, from long before the Revolution. Maure, what are we looking at?’
‘Some trick,’ Thalric tried, but not sure whether he believed it.
‘No image, no ghost, just the living woman,’ Maure confirmed.
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