‘Night-time is always better,’ Scyla said. ‘In war they kill looters out of hand, in my experience, which is just what we’d look like.’
‘Darkness is always best,’ Eriphinea confirmed.
The Wasp threw up his hands. ‘Nightfall it is,’ he said. ‘Always assuming we can even get the thing out of the city.’
‘Neither Ants nor Beetles fly, so they seldom watch for fliers,’ Scyla reminded them. ‘We got in. We can get out.’
‘Unless what they say about Ant women is true,’ Kori said.
‘And what is that?’ Phin asked him archly.
‘That they can fly non-stop for a whole night the first time you knock them up.’ The Fly grinned lewdly.
‘And you believe that?’
‘No, but I could have a lot of fun putting it to the test.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘And we’ve got a few pleasant hours to wait, assuming the Vekken don’t kill us. Anything to eat around here?’
‘Are you sure this is the place?’ Stenwold asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ Doctor Nicrephos insisted. ‘You cannot understand, but I am driven – drawn – and I know not by what, but this is definitely the place.’
‘Keep calm, Doctor,’ Stenwold advised him, but Nicrephos was obviously anything but calm. Something had a hold of the old man, something that was now shaking him to his very bones.
There were four of them there loitering outside in the street and looking suspicious. Stenwold had brought Balkus, of course, and because he had gone home first to wash, because he could not bear the thought of Kymon’s blood on him, Arianna had joined them and was here too. He was not sure whether she entirely understood what was going on here but, when Stenwold had left for this errand, she had been tagging along behind him.
He spared her a fond smile, and resisted the urge to reach for her hand. ‘This is Master Briskall’s place,’ he said, belated recollection coming to him. ‘I knew I recognized it. He used to be an archivist at the College, but there were questions as to where some of the exhibits were disappearing to . . .’
‘We have to go in,’ Nicrephos insisted. ‘Please, Master Maker.’
‘Are we expecting trouble here?’ Balkus hefted the nail-bow. ‘Want me to send Master Briskall a warning shot?’
‘No!’ Stenwold snapped. He did not understand why this whole venture felt like something criminal, but maybe Doctor Nicrephos’s furtive manner was beginning to infect all of them. ‘I am a Master of Collegium, therefore we’ll knock.’ He turned to say more to the Moth, but the grey-skinned old scholar was wringing his hands and silently baring his yellowed teeth.
‘Well if you want to do things the hard way,’ Balkus muttered, ‘I’ll get them out of bed.’
The big Ant went up to the reinforced door and his fist descended, a single booming thud that had the door already swinging open on its hinges. The others crowded forwards instinctively.
‘Oh—’ the big man said, and then swept back one arm, knocking all three of them, even Stenwold, off his feet. A second later there was a flash, and Balkus staggered back, tripped on Stenwold and sprawled out in the street.
‘That was a Wasp sting!’ Arianna cried out. Nicrephos was desperately trying to get up.
‘Balkus?’ Stenwold called in dismay.
The Ant sat up, a patch of his chainmail now fused together over his chest. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted, and unslung his nailbow.
‘They are trying to steal it!’ Nicrephos shouted in alarm. ‘We must stop them! Please, Stenwold!’
‘All right!’ Stenwold drew his sword, took a second to steel himself, and then flung himself in. The expected bolt sizzled past him and he hit the floor awkwardly, trying to roll away. A moment later the very floor seemed to shake as Balkus discharged his nailbow three times through the doorway, and then moved in to take cover behind a side-table whose exquisite vase he had just shattered. They were in an entrance hall with a door at the far end, and another in each of the long side walls. Stenwold saw movement ahead as the unknown Wasp drew back, and he took advantage of this. All of a sudden he was no longer tired, no longer the War Master, but just Stenwold Maker and free to make his own mistakes, with his own life as the only stake.
The Wasp, out of uniform in a long coat, reappeared with his hand spread, but Stenwold was already far too close and moving too fast for that to work. He had knocked the arm up before the man loosed his sting, and cannoned into him with enough force to send them both sprawling. Stenwold had the better of the collision and already had his sword stabbing down at his opponent. The Wasp twisted agilely out from under him so that the point of the descending blade chipped the floor tiles, but Stenwold managed a quick reverse and caught the man under the chin with his pommel as he tried to rise, sending the Wasp reeling backwards.
‘Beware!’ he heard Nicrephos croak. ‘Someone here has power!’
Stenwold smacked the Wasp across the back of the head with his sword-hilt, sending him back to the ground, and then something snaked past him and caught about his throat. Its claw hooked sharply into his armpit, dragging him off balance.
A grapple! he realized, before seeing a stocky Fly-kinden across the room holding the other end of the rope he was just about to pull. Trying to brace himself, Stenwold got one hand on the rope about his neck, so that he was only pulled off his feet and not strangled with it. Then Balkus burst in with the others right behind him.
The rope tightened, the barbed tines digging into him, and then the Fly had a shortsword drawn and was flying straight towards him, even as Stenwold choked and tried desperately to dislodge the hook. Balkus was . . .
Balkus was staring strangely, his nailbow hanging loose in his hands. Stenwold shouted at him for help, but his face had gone slack, utterly devoid of expression.
The Fly was abruptly crouching on top of him, his sword clutched in both hands like an outsized dagger. Stenwold groped for him, seeing only a careful concentration on the man’s flat face. With one hand still on the entangling hook, Stenwold got his other hand on one of the Fly’s wrists. For a moment the man was pushing down against him, the tip of the sword descending until it touched Stenwold’s chest.
There was a woman pointing at Balkus, a Moth woman. She was approaching him with a dagger in one hand, but her other was directed at him, so that the power of her Art held him immobile as she approached. She was speaking words that Stenwold could not hear and the big Ant just stared back at her with a glazed expression. In the Moth woman’s hand the dagger’s glistening blade was smeared with something black. She was smiling all the while.
With a supreme effort Stenwold halted the sword’s further descent, locking his own arm and pushing up against the smaller man’s wrist whilst still hauling at the hook with his free hand. The Fly-kinden’s teeth were bared in a snarl and he was remarkably strong for one of his small kind. Suddenly he grinned and simply took up the sword one-handed, leaving Stenwold clutching the useless wrist of an empty hand. Stenwold yanked at it furiously, putting the man off his stroke so that the sword just clipped his ear, but then the Fly’s wings flashed out to steady him, and he drew the blade back for one final strike.
Arianna’s knife flashed, and the Fly-kinden arched backwards, the weapon spinning from his hands. She struck again and again in fierce desperation as he screamed and bucked, knocking himself off Stenwold’s chest. For a moment he was scrabbling about on the floor to retrieve his dropped sword, his back now a welter of red, and then finally she drove her blade into his side up to the hilt with a cry of revulsion.
Stenwold was aware of Doctor Nicrephos shouting something, and he felt a wave of cold surge through him that had every hair on his body standing on end. The Moth woman cursed in frustration, and lunged her dagger forwards just as Balkus snapped out of his trance. It was a hasty blow she delivered that skittered harmlessly from his mail, and in automatic response the nailbow boomed, sending her flying backwards with a bloody hole punched all the way through her.
‘Stenwold!’ the old Moth
cried. ‘Help me!’ Stenwold staggered to his feet, looking around for the old man. For a brief moment he saw Doctor Nicrephos wrestling with a shadowy figure, and then a blade flashed and the Moth was reeling back, his robe bloodied. Stenwold had a brief glimpse of a Spider-kinden man – no, a Spider-kinden woman? It was impossible in that moment to tell. He roared out a challenge, and Balkus shot another bolt at the same time, but the Spider dodged nimbly, running for the open door with something under his – or her – arm. As Stenwold charged, she – it was definitely a she – turned and flung something at him that struck him in the chest and instantly he was falling, tangled and stuck in strands of fine, sticky silk. A moment later, the Wasp-kinden man was running after the Spider, slipping through the door just before Balkus’ nailbow destroyed the doorframe in three separate places.
Arianna crouched by him, her eyes wide. ‘Who was that?’ she gasped. ‘What is going on?’ Only Doctor Nicrephos knew that, Stenwold thought painfully, for he could still see the old man from where he lay, and there was no doubt that the Moth was dead. As for who that was, though . . . surely it can’t be . . . It could not be, he decided. It must be some other of the same order, for Achaeos had sworn that he had killed the face-shifting spy who had plagued them in Helleron.
A spy in Helleron. A spy in Myna. Now a spy in Collegium. The coincidence was there already, so how much further for it to have all been the work of one man – or one woman? And how difficult was it for a master of disguise to play dead?
Arianna was patiently disentangling him from the Art-made web, and after a moment Balkus joined them, slotting a fresh magazine into his nailbow.
‘Any idea what they got away with?’ he asked.
‘None,’ said Stenwold helplessly. ‘And no understanding of this at all.’ He took a good long time to recover his breath, leaning back against a wall of Briskall’s entrance hall, staring mournfully at the body of Doctor Nicrephos, whose last desperate request had cost the old man his life – and achieved nothing. Arianna crouched beside him protectively, her head on his shoulder. She had saved his life, he realized. He had hardly noted it in all the confusion, but the Fly-kinden would have had him if she had not stabbed the man first. Spiders played deep games, but he allowed himself to hope that this was it, this was all, and at last the womanly concern she presented to him was the Arianna that really was.
He was unspeakably grateful for her company at that bleak moment.
There was the dead Moth woman to consider, as well. This mixed bag of raiders had all the hallmarks of a mercenary team. The presence of a Wasp did not guarantee they were imperial, nor did it seem likely they were Vekken.
It was all rather more than he could disentangle.
He heard Balkus’s clumping tread, and then the big Ant was back with yet another body slung over his shoulder. As he lowered it to the floor Stenwold saw an elderly Beetle-kinden who had been killed by a single knife-blow to the back of the neck.
‘Master Briskall was at home then,’ Stenwold said weakly. ‘What else did you see through there?’
Balkus shrugged. ‘Bit of a mystery, Master Maker. There’s a nice big lock on this door, and all manner of stuff behind it that any thief would go out of his mind to steal. Some of it’s in locked cages or behind glass, but there’s plenty there just for the grabbing, only they didn’t.’
‘We interrupted them?’ Stenwold suggested.
‘That Spider had something with her when she ran off,’ Balkus pointed out, and he had obviously made his mind up about the sex of the escapee. ‘There’s one thing gone, something square and about so big.’ His hands made a shape no more than six inches to each side. ‘It was just out on a stand, though – nothing this old boy wanted locked away.’
‘Just an opportunistic grab, maybe,’ Stenwold suggested, but an odd thought came to him: Or something Master Briskall did not know the value of.
The three of them then carried the bodies of Briskall and Doctor Nicrephos to the nearest infirmary, although they were both beyond all healing. Stenwold told a reliable-looking soldier about the other bodies, and advised that Briskall’s house should be secured against thieves. Then the three of them returned to Stenwold’s home, to find a messenger waiting on his doorstep with even worse news.
Scyla realized, as she left, that her only regret was that Gaved had escaped. She worked alone for preference, so she had taken no joy in the company the Empire had forced on her.
And she had no intention of sharing a reward with anyone. If this box was so important, then the Wasps would just have to pay the full amount to her alone.
Within a street she had taken on the guise of a portly Beetle woman, easy enough to do under cover of darkness, and was heading towards the nearest city wall. Getting through the Vekken lines would be harder, but she was adept at her craft.
Though heavily carved, the box was otherwise as unassuming as she had been told, but she had been given no time yet to make a detailed examination. If she could find out what was so special about it, then maybe she could raise the asking price. The Empire had a lot of money to throw around, and with a thousand faces at her disposal she had no worries about making enemies. Perhaps she should even impersonate Gaved? Now that would be amusing.
She guessed that Gaved would now be circling the streets looking for her, but between her disguise and his pitiful Wasp eyes, he had no chance at all. He would give up in the end and get himself out of the city before dawn, heading back to the imperial masters he constantly disavowed but would never quite escape.
Some part of the back of her mind was aware that those who had originally taught her would despair at her behaviour. Theirs was a noble and ancient calling of spies, and now she was a mere profiteer prostituting the gifts they had awakened in her just for spite and for gold. She had long ago lost sight of any higher goals she might have had, any lasting achievement she could make. Now it was just the getting and the gaining and, most especially, the joy of outwitting – making bigger fools of all the fools out there, who looked no further than another’s face.
She reached the city wall and stood close to it, seeing no one around, no airborne shape hovering above. Calling on her Art she swiftly scaled the stonework, hands and booted feet clinging easily to its smooth stone. Flat against it, near the top, she waited as a sentry passed by, with eyes only for the Vekken camp beyond. She crawled onto the walkway and the battlements and, like a shadow, face downwards, to the earth below.
Now came the real challenge. She could have crept from darkness to darkness, and thus avoided the Vekken lanterns, but she wanted to complete her victory. She wanted to fool a whole army.
She focused her concentration and changed her face and form, taking on the obsidian hue of a Vekken Ant, even down to the dark chainmail and helm. Ants could not be fooled by mere appearances amongst their own kind, though, and she stretched her powers and gifts, feeling tensions and strains within her mind as she worked with it, reaching out towards something that was a distant and foreign concept, an ideal, a mere idea, but something that was the fount of Ant-kinden Art.
And the night was full of voices. She heard the rapidly passed reports of sentries, the chatter of artificers working on the artillery, questions from officers, and the complaints of a few who simply could not get to sleep, and she walked into it and, when she was seen, she simply greeted them, mind to mind, as any Ant would. If they had asked her questions it might have been difficult, in an army where any stranger could be identified so quickly, but it never even occurred to them to be suspicious, for she was doing the impossible, counterfeiting them so well that they could not conceive that she was not one of them.
Blithely and openly, she walked straight through the Vekken camp and out into the night.
By dawn she was far from the Vekken camp, back to the easy guise of a Spider-kinden man of younger years. When she had first called up this face he could have been her twin. Now he was a decade younger than she was.
The local people around here
, solid farmers all, had heard about the siege of Collegium but had no idea what to do about it. They were simply awaiting the outcome, and if that meant Vekken soldiers coming down the road then they would take it as it came. Even the Vekken needed farmers to till the land, and Scyla suspected life as Vekken slaves would not change their rural ways so very much.
She found a barn where two placid draft-beetles were stabled, and climbed up to the hayloft. It was time to examine her prize.
Nothing but a box carved in wood – that was her first impression. The carvings were strange, though. They drew the eye in a way that seemed to ignore the angles and corners of the thing, as though whatever they truly encompassed had no real edges at all, and they led on and led on, and as she turned the thing over in her hands she could see no end or beginning to them, coiling and twining traceries of thorny vines and ragged-edged leaves that overlapped and overlapped and only emphasized the depths of the spaces in between them, depths that seemed, by some trick of light and shadow, to fall into recesses far further than the small box itself could readily accommodate.
In her intense concentration she did not notice the light wane within the stable, or hear the increasingly uncomfortable shuffling of the big insects below.
But how remarkable, she thought, that those lines split apart again and again, and yet whatever path she followed only turned and twisted, while all the others flourished with leaves, and carved insects, beetles and grubs and woodlice and other things that dwelled within rotten wood. Over and over she turned it, trying to unravel the essential mystery. A box it was, and light enough that it must be hollow, and yet there was no lid, no catch, no way of working her way into it, save to follow, follow, follow the carved patterns laid over and under one another, round and round the seemingly endless sides of the box.
There was a flickering within her mind, like shadows when the candle flame is blown, a flickering and a dancing, and at last she looked up, and saw shadows moving of their own accord across the walls of the barn, shadows that her eyes picked out of the darkness. Warrior shadows, with spined arms and stalking gait, the shadows of great clawed insects, forelimbs clasped in solemn prayer, robed men raising daggers to a shadow moon, and ever the interlacing, clutching branches of the encroaching trees. Shadows overlapping with yet more shadows, so that whatever was being enacted around her and within her mind was lost, save for the emotions that flooded and coursed through her, beyond her beck and call, as wild and furious as a storm tide: rage, betrayal, loss, a seething sense of bottomless hatred.
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