Empire in Black and Gold

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Oh, you won’t find any locals willing to go into a noble family’s crypts,’ I told him lightly. ‘Not with the curses.’

  ‘You don’t believe that’ – nothing but a growl deep in Roven’s throat.

  ‘Oh, we’re all civilized sorts from the Spiderlands,’ I said. ‘Still, makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Come on down,’ came Skessi’s distant call, and we did so, the Wasps lowering themselves on spread wings, and me edging hand-over-hand down the wall. The gaslamps threw guttering shadows across walls made of irregular stones that still fit into each other so tight you’d not get a blade in.

  ‘This is never just for the dead,’ Roven spat. ‘Too much work. Burn ’em or bury ’em, but not all this digging and masonry.’

  ‘Reckon they took their dead seriously, back then,’ I put in. Fael and Skessi were already ahead, but it was so pitchy down there that even they had so stay within the edge of the lantern light. I began to wonder then whether this wasn’t just some kind of grain store. Fael was leading strong, but it wouldn’t have done to show we weren’t sure, so I was as much in the dark as Roven right then.

  I’d have been able to pacify the Wasps, I think, had we turned up nothing but a few jars of rice that first day, but some kind of luck was with us, good or bad, you decide, because Fael found some gold.

  It was in some niches in the wall, and there wasn’t much of it, but it was enough to make us look good. No bodies, mind, just a little trinketry: brooches, rings. I caught Fael’s eye, because of the two plans we were running right then, the first one, the get-rich one, had turned out sunny. That stuff we’d read, in that other old castle, looked to have been true after all, just like I told Roven. Of course, the second plan, the new one, would need a bit of work.

  Roven and Merric confiscated all that glittered, although I’d bet Skessi pocketed a handful as well, and then there was nothing for it but for Fael to press on. Every so often there was a niche, and sometimes there was a piece of loot there, and sometimes there wasn’t. Then Fael had yelled out, his wings taking him up so fast he bounced off the ceiling and ended up scrabbling away on his backside as something reared up over him. The Wasps’ stings flashed, blinding bright down here, and then things went quiet. I helped Fael get to his feet, and he looked shaken. It had been a centipede, and living proof of how well you can live eating roaches and pillbugs and silverfish: ten feet long if it was an inch. Not a man-eater, but the poison in those fangs would have finished Fael off surely and, anyway, centipedes are bad luck in the Commonweal, because of old history.

  We went on a bit slower after that. The roof was lower, for a start, and the walls had become oddly slick and nasty to the touch. The floor was slippery, and sloping too, and the lanterns didn’t seem to be giving out enough light even for me. I could hear the two Wasps breathing harsh and hoarse in my ear, and a lot of other little scuttlings and scrabblings as well. Nobody was much looking forward to stepping on the next centipede, or whatever other venomous residents we might disturb. You didn’t get scorpions so much in the Commonweal, but my little spider brothers certainly put in an appearance, and I didn’t have the Art to warn them off. Skessi was sticking close to the light, now. He might not have the fear of the dark that the Wasps had, but he was now somewhere he couldn’t make much use of his wings. In the Lowlands the Fly-kinden love little tunnels. Their warrens are mazes of chambers and narrow vertical drops and the like that make it impossible for any bigger kinden to get around. I think Imperial Fly-kinden don’t like being enclosed so much. Certainly Skessi wasn’t at all fond of it.

  Then came the bad news. The whole thing led to a wall: a dead end.

  We argued then, or at least the Wasps threw accusations and we tried to defend ourselves. The loot we’d found already might as well not have been there. They wanted the big haul, worth absconding from the army for. Harsh words were exchanged, a free and frank exchange of views, until Merric got free and frank enough to shoot at Fael. His sting went wide, from poor light and Fael throwing himself flat, but it knocked a chunk out of that wall, a chunk the size of your hand.

  I won’t swear something moved beyond that gap, but Skessi was shouting that it had, and then a great deal was moving all at once because the tunnel saw fit to collapse.

  Not all of it, and not all at once, but Fael just pitched forward into what was suddenly quite a big hole, though too many stones and stuff in the air to use his wings. I felt the earth beneath me shift, and I scrabbled back and back, Art-clinging from stone to stone, and feeling each one move as I trusted it. One of the lanterns smashed and the other one went out, and it was all suddenly very black, and everyone was shouting.

  We got to a stage when the only noise was us, though, and all the loose stone that was going anywhere had gone. Roven had somehow shielded his dead lantern with his body to save the glass, and now he coaxed a little light from it. The place had undergone severe redecoration. We counted the two Wasps and me, and Skessi had got clear, of course, because his kind always do.

  ‘Fael?’ I called. I had no idea what shape the plan was in just then, but the plan needed Fael, for starters.

  ‘Here,’ came a weak voice, and then, with extreme urgency, ‘Down here, quick!’

  I started forward, and Roven came with me, lantern out. The first thing we saw was that the place was crawling with critters. There were little centipedes, finger-length, and worms and slugs and some kind of palm-wide albino cricket that just looked as if it would be bad to touch. The tunnel we were in had just gone, a few feet ahead, but it had gone into a lower level that none of us had guessed at. Roven tried to get some light down there, and the first thing we saw were the bodies.

  I hadn’t thought Fael was telling the truth, perhaps he hadn’t either. There hadn’t been bodies in the other place, just a little loot and the writing that put us onto this one. There were bodies here though. Before the stones had fallen on them, they had been standing up in armour, and one of them was still on its feet, propped up in an alcove with its bony hands about a sword hilt. The rest were in pieces, and the dried skulls seemed to leer and scream out at us when the lantern light hit them. There was plenty else to catch the light, though, and it was mostly gold. Fael was lying there surrounded by a Monarch’s ransom in gold: the armour the corpses had been wearing was all precious metals and enamel and gems, and there were other pieces: jewellery, masks, inscribed tablets, and all of it enough for any two of us to live on till the end of our days. No coins, of course, because even these days the Commonweal runs off barter and goodwill, but all the same there were lots of these little ingots of gold that I’d never seen before. There were weapons, too, fine ones, and some pieces of gilded armour that were big enough for one of the giant Mole Cricket-kinden to wear, and were surely just for show. There were spread quivers of white-shafted arrows with elegant pearl-hafted bows, and dragon swords with inscribed blades.

  ‘Start passing it all up,’ Roven snapped, a barbarian at heart, and signalled for Merric to go down to help. Merric was having none of it, though. He was staying well back from the edge. Something had spooked him. At the time I thought it was just the danger of another collapse.

  ‘I don’t think I can fly, not carrying any weight,’ Fael said. He was sitting up, and I couldn’t see any obvious hurt. I got it: this was part of the plan.

  ‘I’ll go down and help,’ I said, but Roven pushed me back, grabbing Skessi by the collar before the fly could scoot away.

  ‘Starting shifting it up here,’ he said, virtually throwing the Fly down into the pit. Fael was already kneeling by then, gathering up stuff into a sack. The Fly ended up hovering above the room’s centre and, in a rasping voice, asked, ‘What’s through there?’

  There was an archway, you see. The pit Fael had fallen into wasn’t just on its own. It must connect to some other set of tunnels. The archway was big, ten feet high at the keystone. The whole chamber was big, for that matter. It dwarfed the dead guardsmen someone had posted down
there.

  ‘Forget about through there,’ Roven snapped down. ‘Just bring up the treasure.’

  Skessi got the first sack, and very nearly couldn’t get it airborne. With a supreme flurry of wings he got it to where Roven could snag it, and then Roven would have tilted head forwards into the pit if Merric hadn’t grabbed him. By that time Fael had a second sack of loot just about ready, but he was doing a lot of looking about and twitching, and I took that as being plan two, part two.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he called out abruptly. Skessi dropped the sack he’d just been passed, and vaulted into the air again.

  ‘There was nothing!’ Roven bawled. ‘Bring the loot up, you little pin-sucking bastard!’

  ‘I heard it!’ Skessi squeaked. ‘Something’s coming.’ He was fumbling for the sack.

  ‘Nothing’s coming!’ Roven shouted back. I thought he was shouting so loud to block out anything that he might hear. Merric had retreated a good ten feet back down the tunnel, eyes wide. He’d have run, I think, if the lantern hadn’t still been by Roven’s feet.

  Skessi got airborne again, straining furiously to lift the sack up to us. Behind him, Fael gave out a dreadful shriek.

  ‘Avaris!’ he cried. ‘Run! Just run! Leave the loot and run!’

  That was my cue. I followed his exclamation with a blood-curdling wail and just bolted, and to my glee Merric was already outpacing me to the exit. It was pitch dark, but there was only one way to go, and we went. Skessi overtook me before I hit daylight, keening like a madman. I heard Roven behind, lumbering and cursing and bouncing off the walls. The last we heard from Fael was a high, rending scream, wordless and filled with horror. I could barely stop grinning.

  It was still daylight outside, of course, and that put a little bravery back into them. We rendezvoused at the camp, where the hobbled horses were skittish and the beetle was practically dancing with anxiety, and I saw that the plan hadn’t quite worked.

  I had to hand it to Roven for utter single-mindedness. He had fled just as we had fled, but he’d had both the self-possession and the sheer Art-fired strength to drag both sacks of treasure along with him. We were out and we were rich, which was all good for the two Wasps, and not much fun for me. I had no illusions that they’d give me any kind of share.

  We stayed and watched the opening for some time, but there was no further sign of Fael, of course. The other two were looking to Roven for ideas, and they were relieved as anything when he said, ‘We move out. We’ve got what we came for.’ Merric broke camp, and we loaded up the beetle. It was a plodding old thing, that beetle. It could keep up with the horses walking, but not at a gallop. There was no chance of using it for a quick getaway, not laden like that.

  However, Fael and I, we’d talked about this. The plan could survive a few knocks. It just meant it was going to be difficult, and we’d have to do some things we might regret, but I was ready for that. I’d regretted most of my life so far, save hitching up with Galtre Fael, so why should this caper be any different? Skessi was already doing my work for me, as though he was in on it. ‘I saw them,’ he was insisting, mostly because it meant he was getting out of doing any work. ‘I saw them coming for us. The white shapes. White shapes with grey wings.’

  ‘You saw nothing,’ Roven told him disgustedly. When Skessi started to say more, Roven put an open palm his way, and the Fly shut up. The Wasp looked at me next. ‘You see anything, Spider-born?’

  ‘I see the weather’s turned,’ I told him mildly, and it had. The sky was scudding white clouds, not the white of light weather but heavy with snow. I thought of the path back to Roven’s army, twenty days of hills and forests and solitude. We might pull it off yet.

  We mounted up. Skessi preferred to stay airborne, letting Fael’s horse trudge behind mine as mute testimony to our losses. We made poor time that day. The wind was against us, cutting coldly and keenly enough that the horses didn’t want to walk straight into it, and they would veer off every time they could. The snow came shortly after midday, first a light feathering of big, slow flakes, then flurrying and blowing into our faces until we could see nothing of the road, barely anything of our horses’ heads. The beetle was leashed to Roven’s horse, and a dozen times I thought of trying to cut the traces, to lead the thing off into the snow. It was going slower than ever in the colder weather, though, and I was too worried about getting lost myself. I could freeze to death as easily as the next man, and the Wasps were better equipped to get a fire going.

  We stopped before nightfall, because Merric had found a wooded hollow that would keep the fire’s heat in. The wind was really up, then, and when it hit the trees it made all kinds of sounds: my cue again. When we were all sitting round the best fire Merric could make, I jumped up all of a sudden, meaning they did too, swords out and palms already extended.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I called over the wind.

  ‘What?’ Roven snarled at me.

  ‘Voices!’

  His look was all belligerence on the surface, but that surface was thin ice. ‘Whose?’

  ‘They were calling my name!’ I insisted.

  ‘You’re Dragonfly?’ Roven demanded. I just shook my head dumbly. He tried out a disgusted expression, but I could tell they were all listening now, as we sat down again. The problem was, once you’ve said a thing like that, well, the wind makes all kinds of noises, out there in the wilds. I just hunched closer to the fire and told myself in no uncertain terms that under no circumstances could I really hear my name in the wind now. I’ve always had an active imagination and it’s never done me much good.

  Then it was Roven’s turn to jump up, sword out, and so we repeated the whole pantomime. This time, when he insisted he’d seen a shape out there, everyone was supposed to believe him.

  ‘Bandits,’ he snapped out. ‘Got to be. They’ve seen the fire.’ Nobody objected to this, although I think you’d have had to be within burning distance to notice it. ‘Merric, go scout. You find anyone, kill them.’

  Merric didn’t look happy about that, but Roven was a sergeant, and he was just a soldier, and they hammer that into the Wasp army with big lead hammers. This, too, was in the plan, but it was that part of the plan we hadn’t really talked much about.

  Merric bundled himself up in a cloak, a grey-white garment that would hide him nicely in this weather. He had his shortsword drawn and ready by his side, but he led with his offhand, palm-out. Crouching low to the ground he went, with just one backward glance at Roven.

  He didn’t come back. By the time that became clear, the night was well and truly upon us and nobody was going off to search for him. The three of us, Wasp, Fly and Spider, just looked at each other mutely over the fire and listen to the storm call off its roster.

  Merric was still absent the next morning when we set off, trailing two horses now, and with the snow much decreased. We caught up with the man soon enough, though. He was waiting for us, in a way.

  It was a long time before Roven spoke, once we saw that. I don’t know how long he’d known Merric, or what he felt about him, but he took a good, long look at what had been laid out for us. It made me wish for more snow.

  He was strung between two trees, held there by some tying of the whip-like branches themselves, arms and legs spread out at unnatural angles. The pieces of his armour, the plates of the Light Airborne, were hanging off, scratched and dented. He had been quite hollowed out. You could see his spine through his belly. His eyes were gone too, and his tongue. His head was back, his mouth was open, and you could almost hear the scream in your mind. It was a real professional job. The Wasps themselves seldom put that much effort into stringing up a corpse. For them it’s just a couple of crossed pikes and leave them to sag, most of the time.

  Skessi was swearing under his breath now, almost constantly. ‘On,’ Roven said at last, and kicked at his horse, even though it needed no real encouragement. I followed right along, feeling those absent eyes watch me go. This was still the plan, but the details had
turned my stomach. I knew the reasoning, but still there’s such a thing as going too far. Of course, Merric would have been dead before all that window-dressing happened, but even so . . .

  We made better time that day, although the ruin was still visible on the horizon when we stopped to camp. The wind was picking up again, and I tried to block my ears. ‘Avaris, run!’ it called, but the wind will say all sorts of things if you let it. After dark the snow crept back too, shrouding the world beyond the firelight in a blur of gusting white, not as fierce as yesterday but it cut us off from the world, severed us from it totally. As the wind formed words, so the snow was apt to make shapes, and it wasn’t long before I stopped looking.

  Skessi was near breaking. He’d been high-strung even before we found Merric, and around the fire that night he ran totally out of brave.

  ‘I want my share!’ he burst out.

  Roven gave him a long, level look. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Give me my share of the loot, now,’ Skessi insisted. ‘I’m not crawling along here like this. Give me mine, and I’m out of here.’

  ‘You’ll keep pace, soldier,’ Sergeant Roven told him.

  Skessi was shaking his head very fast. ‘Oh no,’ he got out, ‘not a hope. You’re going to die. They’re going to catch you. Not me. I’m fast. Give me my share.’

  ‘A whole third of what we’ve got?’ said Roven, grinning. ‘Little man, that’d weigh more than you do.’

  ‘Give me what I can carry. Keep the rest.’

  ‘How generous.’ Roven stood, still trying for casual, but Skessi skipped back a few steps and abruptly his sword was out.

  ‘You cross me, Roven, I’ll tell! I’ll tell your lieutenant about what you’ve been up to. I’ll tell them you killed Merric.’ The Fly was in the air now, wings a-blur, and I heard the wind call, ‘Skessi! Skessi!’

  Roven shot, but Skessi was faster, the bolt of fire streaking past him. The Fly launched himself for the campsite’s edge, towards the dark where Roven would not be able to track him, but he tumbled from the air even as he did so, ending up a crumpled heap at the edge of the firelight.