Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He thought of that other fellowship, so long ago, of dead Marius and of Tisamon’s lost love.

  Not in vain. He swore it to himself. Each sword raised against the Empire, each word spoken, would be added to the scales. He would rally and rouse, he would wake the sleeping, open the eyes of the blind, to gain those swords for his cause, and in the end, if the scales did not tip, if the tide of the Empire drowned all the lands he knew of, then it would not be because he had spared an ounce of effort in resisting it.

  ‘Will you come with me to Collegium?’ he asked them all, and not one face, not even Achaeos’s, told him ‘no’.

  The first shots were yet to be loosed but, when Salma and the others came within sight of Tark, the Wasps were already there. Their camp half-encircled the city’s walls, and it seemed incredible, impossible, that so many had come so swiftly, and making their way through the desert’s fringe.

  Skrill shielded her eyes, tracking down the banners and the symbols, the machines and the formations. ‘I see serious artillery. Wall-pounders and leadshotters are the least of it. Looks like Bee-kinden Auxillian engineers from Szar, if I’m a judge; Cricket diggers from Delve; some wild-boy Wasps from the hill tribes for shock value; even Maynes Ants under arms there, guess they know how much Ants like killing Ants. And there’s a whole row of somethings under canvas, autos or the like. Cut me open, that’s the whole Fourth and then some. Bloody flux!’

  Salma and Totho simply took in this sight in silence. They had never seen so many men of war in one place, let alone their equipment, machinery, earthworks, slaves, mounts, camp followers and sutlers.

  Neither had Tark, they realized. Neither had anywhere in the Lowlands, ever before.

  The glass was so smudged and dusty that only a poor kind of light came through it, but the fly considered it was enough. It buzzed and battered, skating first one way and then back along the filthy pane. The greater world was out there, as the wan light told it, so it made its mindless bid for freedom over and over and over.

  That’s our totem, thought Bello hollowly as he sat by the window, waiting for the call with a score of other scrawny youths. My people, my race – that’s our totem. The machines in the factory next door thundered and crashed in a rhythm he knew by heart.

  The fly had stopped walking up the glass, bemused. It cleaned its face and Bello could almost read its tiny mind as it thought, Well, if I got in, I can get out. That was why flies were superior to wasps or beetles. Wasps would just batter at the window until they fell and died. Flies would get the point, eventually. They would go and find another way out.

  So why can’t we? The Fly-kinden, Bello’s diminutive people, were equally imprisoned, battering away, toiling without end.

  He thought about his father, coming back from the factory, jostled in a crowd of bigger men and women. His father with his shoulders bowed, his balding head down, parcelled in his long coat. He trudged the four hundred yards back home every evening and never thought to fly. The Ancestor Art that gave his people shimmering wings, and the sky, had shrivelled inside him. His feet never left the ground.

  Trapped behind the glass, in Helleron. Helleron, city of opportunity because the Beetle-kinden that owned each stone and soul of it never turned anybody away. The factories were hungry mouths. They chewed up labour, ground it down to grit. There was a place for every newcomer in Helleron, and that place was at the bottom. The magnates who owned the factories and the tenements and the big houses on the hill were all locals, but the grist of their mills came from all the other people of the Lowlands. The little Fly-kinden were everywhere, running errands, serving food, crawling beneath machines to unblock them, adding a little of their blood to make the engines of commerce run smoothly.

  The fat brown-skinned Beetle man who was Bello’s employer stomped in, staring at his charges. ‘Bello! Jons Prater, Lock House in Porter Square, quick as you like.’ Bello jumped up automatically as his name was called, almost ripped the letter from the big man’s hand and was off through the door. The Ancestor Art swelled in him, and he felt the twitch of his shoulder blades as his wings formed, shimmering and half-seen, and then he was airborne. Below him Helleron spread out on all sides like a great stain, smogging the air with the smoke of its factories. There were some parts of the industrial district so thick with it that the air was impassable, poisonous. Bello had lived here all his life, and been running messages since his wings came at age six. Outside the city, the Messengers Guild still held sway with its guarantees of quality and service. Inside it, however, there were plenty who did not want to pay the Guild’s prices, and men like Bello’s employer were swift to spot a market.

  Bello raced along at rooftop height, unravelling his mind’s map of the city for the short route to Porter Square. It would be easy, winging across the sky’s wide bowl, to take this for freedom. The rush of his wings spoke to him of his people’s own warrens far south of here, and all the glorious clear air in between. He was still behind the glass, though. He would give Jons Prater the message and take his money, and then he would be back, waiting with the other youths for the next job. His speed was not dedication, but knowing he would get no pay if he was late. He was thirteen years old and he had a reputation to keep up.

  There were raised voices when he got home. It was an hour after dark and he was wretchedly tired, but he made the effort anyway, flitting from landing to landing without touching the steps between. All around him the tenement creaked and grumbled with the lives of all the cursed people who had nowhere better to live. He heard a dozen arguments and a full-on fight through the thin walls. On the fourth floor he heard his father’s voice: raised but not shouting. His father never shouted any more. He could manage only a whining complaint that held the seeds of its own defeat. Bello stopped, not wanting to go in. He felt a hand on his shoulders, pushing him down, keeping him down. Beyond the day’s long, tired haul he recognized it as despair. Battering against the glass. He sat on the top step and rubbed at his eyes. He would do what he always did. He would wait out here until it was done.

  The stairs creaked on the flight above and he looked up quickly. There was only one person who lived above Bello’s family. The man was a local celebrity, of sorts. He, of them all, lived here because he chose to, not because he must. He said it kept him closer to his clients. Holden, the pugilist. If he had ever had a first name, nobody remembered it. He was just Holden, Holden with the scarred face and the leather coat that didn’t quite hide his shortswords. He was Beetle-kinden, with the squat, solid build of that race, but he was lean with it, balanced. For all he towered over Bello’s three-foot height, he had a cocky grace unusual for his people.

  As he passed the landing he ruffled Bello’s hair. The Fly youth mustered a smile for him. ‘You off to work, Master Holden?’

  ‘Always, son.’ The fighter paused, rolled his shoulders to loosen them. ‘Some fellow in the Gladhander fief’s getting too big for himself, needs a taking-down.’

  Bello followed the news of the fiefs, Helleron’s criminal gangs, as avidly as all his fellows did. Men like Holden were the heroes, the free spirits, who passed through their lives. The simple news that Holden was off to pull the Gladhanders’ noses sent a vicarious thrill through Bello. He would surely lie awake tonight, imagining the man in chases down alleys, fights on the rooftops, stealthy stalking through the halls of his enemies.

  ‘Good luck, Master Holden!’ Bello said.

  ‘Ain’t no such thing as luck, son. Skill’s all,’ Holden told him, setting off down the stairs. ‘Remember that, boy, and you can’t go far wrong.’ As he went, Bello heard the door open, realized his father’s voice had ceased its sad tirade.

  The long-faced old Beetle-kinden man who now came past him on the stairs was the landlord’s agent, whom Bello had known and disliked all his life. He had become a symbol of the family’s hopelessness, its lack of prospects. He turned up every month for his money, and Bello’s father would scrape together what they had, and sometimes it was
enough and sometimes it was short. If it was short, then the man would be back the next week: slow, mournful, patient, three times the size of Bello’s father, insistent. He always got his due eventually. By some grotesque chance he was called Joyless Bidewell. He carried the weight of that name like a sack of coal.

  Bello stepped in before the door closed. His nose told him it was the remains of yesterday’s thin vegetable stew his mother would be serving. His father was at his customary place already, cross-legged on the floor before the low table. He looked at Bello without expression until the boy had handed over the half-dozen bits he had made that day. It was not any threat of retribution that made him part with the money, but the crippling knowledge that there would be none. His father would not even rise to a confrontation with his own son.

  ‘Saw Bidewell on the landing,’ he said, sitting opposite his father. ‘What’s he want now? Rent day was last week.’

  Bello’s father’s haunted eyes flicked up to his wife, who was kneeling at the fireplace and spooning out the stew. He said nothing. He never did. He locked up his troubles, always, where they could be neither goaded nor charmed from him.

  They preferred Bello to stay indoors after dark, but lately he could not bear to. Tonight, with the unspoken something hanging in the air between his parents, he was out of the door the moment he had finished his meal. There were a dozen Fly-kinden families in the same tenement, and more next door. They did not mix with other races but had formed a little community of their own. Bello would go and find his peers, and scrap and gossip and boast about imagined connections with the fiefs and the street fighters. His nodding acquaintance with Holden was hard currency of far more worth than the ceramic chips he was paid in, which were legal tender no further than Helleron’s outlying settlements.

  He almost ran into the man sitting on the stairs before he could stop, his wings flaring awkwardly at short notice, carrying him in a great leap over the man’s head. He landed in a stumble, catching himself with another ghostly flash of his Art. At first he thought it was some tramp off the streets who had come in from the weather. Then he saw it was Joyless Bidewell himself. The Beetle-kinden man was staring at him with that lined face of his. His creased lips moved. Bello hesitated, torn between rushing off and witnessing the prodigy of this man, the Big Man of their tenement, for all he was some bigger man’s agent, sitting on the steps like a drunk.

  ‘Master Bidewell?’ he said eventually. Politeness to the Beetle-kinden, to their faces at least, had been slapped into him.

  Joyless Bidewell frowned, obviously not placing him, then said: ‘You’re Frenno’s boy, no?’ When Bello nodded, the big man sighed, gathered his coat closer about him. ‘Well, I’m sorry, boy,’ he said. He sounded as tired as Bello’s father, as tired as Bello himself had been when he came home.

  ‘Sorry for what? What’s going on?’ Bello demanded. ‘Tell me.’ And then, ‘Please.’

  Bidewell glanced up, up towards Bello’s apartment. He shrugged. ‘Rent’s going up, boy. Quite a step up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not my fault. Not my doing. Been all day telling people like your folks that they can’t afford to live here any more.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do.’ There must have been something in Bello’s face that showed more fire than his father’s, for the old Beetle levered himself to his feet. ‘Two day ago, boy, this street changed hands. The Firecaller fief’s here now, kicked the House of Maynard out. Fire-callers want more cut than old Maynard ever did. Nobody going to pay that ’cept for all you folks who live here. My boss sure ain’t.’

  ‘Then . . . don’t pay,’ said Bello, knowing as he did that this was stupid.

  ‘Don’t call ’em Firecallers for nothing,’ Bidewell mumbled. He pushed past Bello, shaking his head.

  Bello had not gone to his friends. They would have to brag the night through without him. He had sat on the steps where Bidewell had sat, and thought. In his mind the image of a fly battering at the glass came again and again. So go around. Find another way. Bidewell himself was nobody. Take him away and another servant would fill his shoes. Bidewell’s faceless master, some factor of a city magnate, was so far away that to beg of him would be like pleading with the sun. Bello’s parents, like most of the people in the tenement, would be moved on, kicked out. There would be some worse place awaiting them, and then some worse place again. Perhaps they would share a room with another family. Two other families. Already the room they had was only half of one, split down the middle to fit more families in. Everyone knew the Fly-kinden, the little people, needed hardly any space to live in.

  But we were born to have the sky. However, the Beetles, clumsy and industrious and bound to the earth, did not see it that way.

  There was only one way to push, and he had only one means of putting the pressure on.

  There was a taverna seven streets away in the big Gold Boys fief where the fighters met. The Gold Boys had been around for ever. They were comfortable, pally with the guard and the magnates, paying all the right people. They ran entertainments: brothels, gambling houses, illegal fights. It was the high end of the fief culture and it gave them an oft-pawned respectability. The Taverna Marlus had become the fashionable place for the well-to-do to gawp at the lowly but brutal. Thrills for the one, money for the other. Marlus and the Gold Boys did well out of it.

  There was always a gaggle of youths hanging about the doorway. They were a mixture of Fly-kinden and Beetles, halfbreeds and a few others. Bello was not one of them and, if he gave them the chance, they would have knocked him down a few times. His wings flung him straight past them, through the open door and skidding on the rugs of the floor.

  ‘Out, you!’ bellowed Marlus. The proprietor, a pitch-skinned Ant-kinden, was playing dice with several of his richer patrons. He stood up, scowling. The sword at his belt, no less than the crossbow hung above the bar, reminded everyone of his boast to be a renegade soldier from a distant city-state.

  ‘Here to see Holden!’ Bello gasped out, looking frantically around to find the man. For a swooping moment he could not see him, anticipating a hasty ejection and maybe a kicking from the locals. Then he saw the Beetle-kinden fighter at one of the tables, nodding at Marlus. The Ant narrowed his eyes, but sat back down.

  ‘You got a message for me, Bello?’ Holden asked. The Fly youth looked at him seriously. This was the part that he had not rehearsed.

  ‘I – I need to talk to you,’ he said. Holden was sharing a table with two other Beetle-kinden brawlers, and they were already smirking. Bello pressed on. ‘It’s really important. Please, Master Holden.’

  ‘Master Holden,’ one of the others snickered.

  Holden grimaced and stood up, stretching. ‘Ignore them, boy. They’re just jealous because they haven’t pissed off the Gladhanders like I just did.’ Holden’s drinking fellows looked a step more threadbare than he was.

  ‘Right, be quick,’ the fighter said when he got Bello out of earshot. ‘I’m looking to pick up another job this evening.’ He did not say it, but he might as well have done: being seen talking to a ragged Fly-kinden youth would not help his image.

  ‘I . . . want to hire you,’ Bello got out, before his nerve could fail him.

  ‘Yeah?’ Holden grinned at him, delighted. ‘With what, Bello?’

  Bello reached into his pockets and brought out a handful of change. Most of it was ceramic bits, but there were a few silver standards in there. It was all the money that Bello had ever kept back from his parents, all the money he had kept secret and hidden for the right moment. This had to be the moment, and the money had to be enough. ‘They’re going to throw us out. They’re putting the rent up,’ he blurted out. ‘You must have heard.’

  ‘So put this towards the rent,’ Holden said reasonably.

  ‘But what about next month? And what if they put it up again?’ Bello asked. ‘I need to hire you to fight the Firecallers, Master Holden. Because then it’ll be done, and we can go back to the way things were.’
>
  Holden’s face had soured when the Firecallers were mentioned. He closed Bello’s hands over the money. ‘Listen, boy,’ he said. ‘Two things.’ Sympathy twisted at his scars. ‘One: the Firecallers are on the up. They’re doing well these days. I’d charge a lot to start spiking their engines. Two: what you’ve just showed me is less than what I charge for a consultation, let alone to actually draw a sword.’

  He let that sink in, giving Bello time to consider it. In Bello’s head the fly was walking up the pane, trying to work out why it could not get out that way.

  ‘Anyone around here’s going to be the same,’ Holden said. ‘Marlus’s place is for the doing-wells.’ He grimaced. ‘Course, there are other places. Someone might be desperate enough for rep to take on the Firecallers.’

  Bello stared at him desperately. Holden scowled. ‘The world isn’t fair. Know it and move on. You don’t want to get mixed up in this.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Bello asked him. ‘Please, Master Holden, I have to find someone. At least tell me where to look.’

  ‘Listen, boy, you want to go to these kind of places, it’s on your head. They ain’t safe, not any way.’ The fighter sighed. ‘But I can tell you, if you want.’

  Holden’s first recommendation was a gambling house on the riverfront. Helleron’s river trade was halfway to nothing since they had put the railroad in. What had been rich men’s warehouses and offices were fallen into rot and ruin, and all kinds of vermin had moved in. The place had no name but there was a picture of a scorpion painted crude and yellow above the door, just like Holden had described. Nobody stopped Bello going in.

  The first two bravos he tried to speak to, a Beetle and some kind of halfbreed, just cuffed him away. The second one had struck hard enough to knock him to the floor. He righted himself with a flick of his wings. He found a third. She was a lean, elegant Spider-kinden woman, slumming it or down on her luck. There had once been gems in her rapier hilt but the sockets were empty now. When he told her what he wanted she nodded across to one of the house staff and took Bello aside into a little room.