Totho listened to the two councillors tell each other how wonderful it was, that their city was finally being rid of such trash. He noted that neither mentioned the secret deals they had undoubtedly made with those same fiefs, the profits they had squeezed from them or the commissions they had paid. It all made him feel ill.
He himself had betrayed his friends, turned his back on his whole previous life, but these rich and powerful councillors were a whole world of hypocrisy ahead of him.
The first few spots of rain started to fall, and he watched the superbly dressed councillors hurry inside. Totho chose to stay outside, as if the downpour could wash him clean of all his recent actions. After a short while, Kaszaat came and joined him.
For him the last month had brought and taken away many things, but it still had not taken her, though he had assumed, without even analysing why, that she would surely be long gone by now.
‘I just heard the news. Another two factories for you,’ she said. ‘I congratulate you now, yes?’
He shrugged. ‘You know his thinking better than I do. You tell me.’
‘I think yes – but not all the way.’ She leant on the rail beside him, tugging her peaked leather cap down a little to shield her face from the rain. He let himself study her, for him a new luxury. Here was a woman a little older than himself, shorter and with the stocky build and dark skin that reminded him of a Beetle-kinden, and yet subtly different in every way. Her face was flat and round, and he had at first thought it expressionless. Now he knew that impassive front was partly due to being one of a conquered race within the Empire, and the rest he could now read, from experience. He realized that his own habitual expression was not too dissimilar, for his mixed blood had taught him to keep his feelings inward.
‘How is the new project?’ he asked her. His current duties meant that he was committed to actual manufacture, and had lost touch with the research and design that artificers coveted so much.
‘You don’t miss much,’ she told him. ‘You keep with your snapbows. The new work? He doesn’t even let me see it. Only him and a few others, all day and all night in that factory, three, four days at a time. Then they come out and they sleep, and he gets his back seen to. You know how it is with his back, when he works too long.’
Totho did indeed. Not so long ago he had found out why their master, the Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos, suffered as much as he did. It was a revelation personally horrifying but professionally intriguing.
‘So you’re all just kicking your heels waiting?’ he asked, quite relieved. He was not on the team for the new project. Instead, Drephos had given him oversight of the snapbow factories, and a strict quota to be met. When the Wasp army took the field against Sarn in the coming spring, it could be a new dawn for warfare, although Drephos alternated his enthusiasm with damning doubts about the imperial generals’ capacity to actually make use of what they had been given.
‘You want to go see?’ Kaszaat asked, and he glanced at her in surprise. Hidden somewhere in her closed expression was something close to mischief.
‘You’re not one to go against orders,’ he said.
‘No orders. Nobody has said, “Stay out while we’re gone.”’
‘He’s come out of there today, has he?’
She nodded. ‘You’re not curious?’
He realized he was, as he followed her down through the Consellar Chambers and onto the street.
Drephos had been the first ever Colonel-Auxillian. In fact they had created that rank purely for the benefit of Dariandrephos, the maverick half-breed master artificer. Endowed with that authority he had taken the imperial armies on to win wars and conquer cities. Totho had been impressed enough within days of meeting the man, but now, after seeing the fall of Tark and the routing of the Sarnesh army, he was convinced that Drephos could be the greatest artificer there ever was.
It was because he cared for absolutely nothing but his craft, Totho was sure. Drephos did not care about rank, save that it helped get his work done quicker. Similarly, they had chosen him as the first ever Auxillian to be named an acting-governor, but he had only pressed for that position because, as Governor of Helleron, he could turn the city’s industrial might to his own ends.
He had then brought his hand-picked team of artificers to Helleron to assist him. Totho was one of that team and so was Kaszaat, but there was only a single Wasp-kinden amongst them, and that was a moody old outcast who had spent more than ten years as a debt-slave. Drephos collected minds that could think in different directions. He had no need for time-servers and conventionalists.
‘This is the one,’ Kaszaat said. ‘Three days solid, nobody seeing any of them all that time. Came out this morning only.’ By now the oily rain was sheeting down on them, so they ran from overhang to overhang, trying to dodge the worst of it. Ahead of them was the factory she had pointed out, although it did not seem particularly remarkable to Totho.
‘Who has he taken in there with him?’ he asked, as they came up against the factory’s wall, taking what shelter they could.
‘The twins,’ she said, meaning the two Beetle-kinden in their team, who kept no company save each other, ‘And Big Greyv.’
‘The Mole Cricket?’
She nodded. Totho had never spoken to the man. That pitch-skinned giant had a sour look to him that did not encourage conversation.
Kaszaat unlatched the factory door, which was not even locked, and they quickly stepped inside.
Most of the interior was bare, which was the first surprise. The workbenches, the machines, all the paraphernalia of manufacture had mostly been stripped out, save for a series of complex presses intended to test the durability of materials under stress. Aside from that, at the far end of the empty space, there stood two great machines. Totho and Kaszaat approached them cautiously. The sound of the city was faint in here, for all the high windows were propped wide open to let the oil-pungent air in.
‘We must have the wrong factory,’ Totho decided, looking up beyond the machines towards an observation gantry. Had Drephos and the others been standing up there to watch… what exactly?
‘Fans,’ said Kaszaat wonderingly. ‘Just fans.’
That was all they were: huge-bladed fans positioned at one end of a great open space but, on looking at them, Totho suddenly experienced a shiver of unease. He did not believe in magic, he was no Moth seer to brag of visions, yet some part of his artificer’s being shuddered momentarily on seeing those stilled fans, and the emptiness all around them.
Ten
Thalric approached them without ceremony, simply dropping into a seat beside Brodan and saying, ‘At ease, Lieutenant.’ The general scuffle that followed had Brodan and his men half out of their seats, hands raised or already going for their swords.
There was a long pause, in which Brodan stared at him, surely trying to place him. Thalric leant back, waiting, looking as natural, as unconcerned, as could be.
‘Major Thalric?’ Brodan said at last, not quite sure. ‘The same. But do sit down, Lieutenant.’
Brodan did, and about them his men slowly relaxed, though not without a few puzzled glances.
‘Well, it’s been a while, sir,’ Brodan said. ‘Fetch a drink for Major Thalric,’ he ordered one of his men, who jumped to his feet and ran off into the rear of the grimy little Skater drinking hole. ‘I didn’t realize you were in these parts, sir. I thought your work took you out west more.’
Thalric smiled. ‘You know how it is when you do the work we do,’ he said. ‘One day in the Commonweal and the next in Capitas.’ Brodan, he was guessing, had never been to the capital. It was a good name to drop to get the man thinking of him as a superior officer, and so not to be questioned.
‘Of course, sir,’ Brodan acknowledged. ‘Can we help you in any way in Jerez, sir? Or are you here with your own people?’
Thalric studied the man’s face: blunt and honest, under a mop of dark hair, the look of a simple soldier, with a soldier’s powerful build. But B
rodan was Rekef, and therefore more than he seemed. ‘A little of both, perhaps. Tell me, Lieutenant, what are your orders?’
He had expected the man to be cagey about them, but Brodan sighed. ‘Retrieval – some piece of contraband. You know how difficult it is to find anything in this place, though. I’m of a mind to just start executing the locals until someone feels ready to tip us off.’
‘No great loss to the Empire if you do,’ Thalric agreed. It was almost unbearable, this moment of cutting nostalgia. Here he was again, a Rekef major talking with his underlings. He felt his exile – his death sentence – like a weight about his neck. How could he not belong here still? ‘You have leads, of course, or you’ve lost what craft I remember of you.’
‘Precious few,’ Brodan grumbled. ‘Oh, there’s something going on, and some odd faces turning up, but getting to the truth in Jerez, well… Before I made the Rekef I did a stint on the smuggler run here. Night after night out on the lake in little boats, getting eaten alive by the midges and watching the lights. We were out here a month, and they reckoned the trade just got worse while we were. These little bastards, sir, they knew just where we were sitting and what we were there for.’
Thalric nodded sympathetically, hearing the rain patter harder around them. They relocated, by unspoken consent, to beneath the roof of the taverna, huddled in an odd pattern to avoid the leaks through the perished thatch.
‘Of course,’ Brodan said, ‘eventually they reckoned someone in our company was on the take.’
Thalric let that hang there, still casual in his pose, every muscle taut as steel on the inside.
‘Unless it’s a secret, sir, may I know what you’re here for?’
‘Investigating a threat to the Empire, Lieutenant,’ Thalric replied. ‘As always.’
‘A threat to the Empire, sir, right.’ For a long time, Brodan and Thalric just stared at each other, and then Thalric smiled again, feeling a strange release of tension.
‘Your soldier’s not back with my drink, Lieutenant. That seems lax discipline. You shouldn’t stand for it.’
‘No, sir. I’ll have words with him.’
‘When he gets back from the garrison with the others, of course.’
Brodan’s smile was not entirely devoid of regret. ‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t underestimate the speed with which bad news spreads, should I?’ Thalric was still slouching in his chair, quite obviously not the man for any sudden moves. The careless pose made them uncertain, and most of the soldiers obviously did not share Brodan’s up-to-date knowledge of recent Rekef reversals.
‘They made sure to get hold of anyone who used to know you, sir. They told us.’
‘I’m sure they did.’ Inside, he felt sick. So close! For just a minute he had been the man he used to be, and now… betrayal again. He seemed to be a magnet for it, either giving or receiving. He wondered what Brodan had actually been told.
Not that it mattered so much. Brodan was a good soldier and he would obey his orders. ‘They’ll probably make you captain for this, Lieutenant,’ Thalric remarked.
‘That would be nice, sir.’ Brodan’s face remained without expression. There was, Thalric understood, no second chance here for him. Brodan was not the kind of man to let old times get in the way of duty. Thalric could remember a certain Rekef major very close to him who had been just like that, too.
The whole front wall of the taverna was open, just a mess of straw propped up on poles. Without tensing, without any motion to warn them, Thalric kicked the table over, leaping back in his chair with his wings flashing about his shoulders to fling himself backwards, out from under the roof and into the rain-lashed air.
The sting seared from his hand, and one of Brodan’s men was knocked over flat even as he got to his feet. Then Thalric dived away, streaking through the rain a few feet above the muddy ground, and knowing for sure that they would come after him.
A sting-bolt hissed through the rain just to his left, and he flung himself sideways, casting himself down one of Jerez’s wretched, rotten alleys and putting the thin barrier of a few inches of mud and twigs between him and his pursuers. Immediately he turned right again, trusting to the rain to cover him. He heard another crackle as one of them loosed a shot at him, but he did not even see the flash.
His wound was starting to tell on him now, slowing him down. Even as he flagged, one of his pursuers came bowling into him, and the pair of them tumbled end over end before splashing down into the mud, Thalric on his back, and the soldier kneeling beside him, blinking in surprise for a moment, but already extending his hand.
Thalric found inner calm, even as he raised his own open palm, knowing that he did not have time. When he saw the flash, he assumed that he had been shot, almost imagined the burning pain he should feel.
It was the flash of wet steel, not of searing energy, and the soldier’s head was cut cleanly from his shoulders, his body toppling aside in the clenched moment before the blood started.
Thalric clambered to his feet, looking into the eyes of his rescuer, his tormentor.
‘Tisamon,’ he gasped.
The Mantis had no expression, merely cleaning his steel claw before walking off without waiting to see what Thalric would do. There was no telling what he might have seen or guessed.
‘Now what you got to understand,’ said Nivit, ‘is that there ain’t been no grand proclamation that anything big’s goin’ on around here. Right?’
Gaved nodded, recognizing where the Skater’s circumlocution was going.
‘And also there ain’t been no invitations come my way, tellin’ me that anything like an auction might be held any day soon. Most ’specially there ain’t been any sign that some real expensive, real exclusive thing – of about yea big to each side – is being flogged off some time soon, somewhere near where we’re standin’. If you thought I’d heard that, Gaved, you’d be dead wrong.’
The Wasp grinned despite himself. ‘And yet you’ve heard something.’
‘People are our business, Gaved,’ Nivit explained. His girl had meanwhile brought him out a little stack of tablets, and his long hands were sorting through them, apparently without his conscious involvement. ‘Now we always have odd fellas droppin’ in here lakeside, to buy, to sell, to hide, to seek, you know how it is.’
‘I do,’ Gaved agreed.
‘Only you can’t help noticing that in the last couple of tendays the calibre of them has gone up and up. All sorts of grandees from the Empire and elsewhere, all coming in quiet like and just waitin’. Now what happens is, a few days ago some factor comes knocking with a commission. You ever hear of a Founder Bellowern?’
‘I know the name Bellowern,’ Gaved confirmed.
‘Big Beetle dynasty, people all through the Consortium. Rich and powerful. Well, this Founder’s one of the elder sons, maybe the one who gets the whole pot eventually. So what’s he doing lakeside in Jerez? Keeping an eye open for the competition. His man gave me a list of names and faces to look out for and, what do you know – here they all are, if you look hard enough. A good twelve names, and each with a history. Some of them we’d seen here before but most of them, no. This has to be different. This is special. So, old friend, how about you do some talking now, and I can just shut up?’
‘Gladly.’ Gaved sank back carefully in the hammock-sling seat that Nivit’s girl had strung up for him. The very feeling made him curiously at home. Perhaps it was just that here, beside Lake Limnia, a Wasp could almost escape his birthright. ‘There is a box – some mumbo-jumbo thing from the olden days. My principal wants it.’
‘Him and the world, too. Rich fella, is he?’
‘Not especially.’
Nivit made a derisive noise. ‘Then don’t even bother showing. These names I’ve worn my feet out in trailing, they’re rich enough each one of them to buy Jerez outright and the lake as well, or else they’ve got stuff to trade that makes that just about true. Take a look.’ Without Gaved having to p
resume on their friendship by asking, he passed over a tablet containing a shortlist of names that mostly meant little – but brief noted descriptions that soon gave him pause for thought.
Here was the wife of a Wasp colonel, a man who Gaved had heard was now the Governor of Maynes; there were two Spider-kinden manipuli, as the Spiders called their arch-plotters and politicians; a Dragonfly noble who must surely be risking his life even to step inside the Empire; another Consortium baron, and yet another Wasp whose name had been mentioned in connection with the Imperial Court. There were others besides: Moth, Woodlouse, and a gang of factors acting for a buyer of unknown kinden.
Gaved shook his head. ‘Word gets around.’
‘It certainly does.’ Nivit shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Your fella’s out of luck then, it seems.’
‘Assuming he’s interested in buying…’
‘Dangerous words.’ But Nivit was grinning. ‘You’re thinking about the old times now, ain’t you?’
Gaved was busy copying the tablet’s contents onto a scroll that was already looking damp at the edges. The marshes of Lake Limnia were unfortunately death to paper of all kinds. ‘Old times indeed, Nivit,’ he replied. ‘Back when we did more than just hunt down runaway slaves for the Empire.’
‘It ain’t all imperial work these days,’ Nivit argued defensively. ‘Mind, I know what you mean, and I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the man for it, any longer. Thought you’d put that kind of work behind you.’ Stealing property was in a decidedly inferior league to tracking fugitives, but it had been a long time since Gaved had been so desperate. It sent a strange thrill through him, though, the thought of one last heist. He had never considered himself as a thief, just a recoverer of goods, a returner of lost property. The rest of the world had not been so indulgent with the labels.
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