‘Lady Felise,’ Tisamon said slowly, ‘we have met. Do you remember?’
‘Did we fight?’ she asked, almost in the voice of a child.
‘You gave me that honour,’ said the Mantis, giving the words special meaning only for him and for her.
Something shifted behind her face again, something trying to be heard, but then again it was that perfect mask, beautiful and terrible all at once, and the guards clutched at their maces and raised their shields. ‘I have found my prize,’ she said coldly. ‘He is within this room. I will not let anything keep me from him. Not even you, Mantis.’
Tisamon’s voice was a whisper. ‘What . . . what’s in the room, Sten?’
‘Tisamon, please—’
‘Because I know who she’s hunting, Sten.’
There are better and easier ways to break this news to Tisamon, Stenwold reflected. The dreadful tension of the Dragonfly woman was like a shrill sound at the very edge of his hearing. Bloodshed was imminent.
‘He’s here,’ he confirmed. ‘Thalric is here. He gave himself up. He claims the Empire has cast him out and tried to kill him.’
‘Does he indeed?’ said Tisamon, without sympathy. ‘This woman wants Thalric dead, Sten. She wants to cut his throat and probably dance in his ashes. I have no issue with that, myself.’
‘We . . . need him,’ Stenwold whispered. He could see the Dragonfly, Felise, standing perfectly still, focusing inwards and inwards. I have seen that look before, in Tisamon. There was another there as well, hanging back further down the hall, a long-haired Spider with a wry smile. Stenwold could see how they had gained access: the two of them, travelling together on this day, would seem like just more of the rescuers from across the seas.
‘What is this?’ Felise demanded, taking a better grip on her blade. ‘Fight me or stand away from me. I will have his blood. I will have the blood of any that stand in my way.’
It was a gesture that always seemed a good idea at the time but never quite worked out so. Stenwold stepped forward and walked towards her. Past the two guards he caught a glimpse of Thalric inside his room. Something had gone out of the man, some hope of a last chance.
‘Stenwold,’ the Wasp said, half warning, half imploring, ‘remember Cheerwell—’
Without warning the woman’s sword was at Stenwold’s neck. He looked into Felise’s eyes and saw madness gathering there like stormclouds.
This was not a good idea. ‘I am Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium. This man’ – his nerve almost failed – ‘is in my care. Why do you wish to kill him?’
The blade jumped, the edge cutting an inch of shallow blood. ‘Ask him,’ she hissed. ‘Master Stenwold Maker of Collegium. If it is not enough that his people have raped my homeland and slain my people in their thousands, ask him what it is that he has done against me.’
Remember Che, the thought came. Thalric might be his only chance of seeing the girl again. ‘Thalric?’ he asked faintly.
‘Stenwold, you need me.’
‘Only if I can trust you for the truth,’ Stenwold said flatly, and he saw something pass across Thalric’s face. Here was a man in a trap of his own making. The Wasp knew what would now happen even before he spoke, and in that fatal moment Stenwold finally recognized some virtue there, beyond all the principles the Empire had built in him, because despite what would follow he said, ‘I killed her children, Master Maker. The Empire wanted a certain noble Commonweal bloodline extinguished, and so I went into her castle and killed all her children. She had no sword then, when we surprised her. She was taken for a slave. I suppose she escaped.’ Thalric’s voice sounded flat, sick.
Stenwold pictured Che, either dead now or incarcerated in a Wasp cell, or at the mercies of their artificers, and he looked into Felise’s face and reassessed her. This was the face, he decided, of a mother who had loved her children and who now wanted solely to avenge them.
I have no right, he knew, and he gestured to the guards, who stepped back in evident relief. Felise spared him one more brief glance before passing through the doorway.
Forty-One
Her captors had found a little cluster of farm buildings nearby, stone-built and solid, with a big storage cellar that they had cleared out, throwing away everything not immediately edible or useful. Che hoped that the farming family who had once lived here had been given the chance to flee before the black and gold storm.
In the cellar their artificers had been busy even before the battle, and wooden beams from a dismantled house had been used as bars to mark out a pen that would hold a dozen prisoners at most. A few dried stains of reddish-brown suggested she was not the first.
She was the only one now, though – the only prisoner they had taken out of those that had failed and fallen in the Battle of the Rails.
When she had tumbled from the stalled automotive, she had her blade ready in her hand, certain that death was moments away. She had imagined herself then as a Tisamon or a Salma, ready to die striking a blow and enjoy a soldier’s honourable end.
But all around her the Wasps were swarming along the rails, blackening the sky above. These men, who had been fleeing so recently, were back, with a vengeance that could be sated only with blood. Everywhere, Wasp soldiers were stooping on the survivors to slaughter them. They hacked down the Sarnesh field surgeons whether or not they lifted blades against them. They killed the wounded, swiftly and brutally, just as their comrades were doing over all the battlefield.
She had felt the sword slip from her fingers, her mind filled with the horror of it, and she realized, then, that she had been lying to herself for a long time. This was the real face of war, and she could never be a true soldier.
Che had stood there motionless, unnoticed and unthreatened, with the Wasps massing back and forth all about her. It had been that total stillness that saved her, though her head had spun. The stillness, and her empty hands, until at last a Wasp had dropped before her, seeing a wide-eyed, unarmed Beetle girl, assuming her a slave, perhaps. He had called two of his comrades to wrestle her away, and she had not resisted them. A moment before, she had wanted to die as brave warriors died, but when she saw what that looked like, repeated over and over all around, she very much wanted to live.
She had not necessarily accomplished that, either. She had been confined in here more than a day, now, and they had given her water but no food. She could hear, from sounds above, that the Wasps were resetting their camp, and seemed in no hurry to chase the Sarnesh back to their city walls, but nobody had come to question her, or rescue her, or even to look at her.
Slavery, she told herself. Would it really be so bad? Perhaps some kind master would buy her. After all, she had a Collegium education. Perhaps she could teach Wasp children.
She knew that a life of slavery could be bad, and she knew equally that there were worse fates by far.
There was a rattle at the hatch above, chilling her heart, because her water bowl was still half-full.
There had been pitch-darkness in the cellar before, which would have been a terror to her if her Art had not penetrated it and allowed her to see. The sheet of sunlight that now splashed down the stone steps was a harsh glare at first, and she shaded her eyes. She heard sandalled feet descending and forced herself to look.
A Wasp soldier was peering doubtfully at her, by the bluish light of a mineral-fuel lantern.
‘This is her,’ he said, to someone standing above him, and then came all the way down to the cellar floor to make room.
The man following took the stairs awkwardly, limping and holding to the wall. He wore no Wasp uniform, being swathed instead in a hooded robe, and he seemed to need no lantern when he peered at her.
‘Just one prisoner,’ he said tiredly. ‘Well the intelligencers will suffer more than I. And she will be theirs, I suspect, unless I press my claim on Malkan. You say she had some tools on her?’
‘Only a few, sir,’ the soldier below him said, ‘not a full artificer’s set, but she is a Beetle, sir. They’re reckoned
good with machines.’
‘Not without proper tools, they’re not,’ grumbled the hooded man. ‘She’s probably a worthless slave or something. Or did I hear that the Sarnesh keep no slaves?’ He glanced up at a third man who was standing higher on the steps, and obviously saw him shake his head. To Che this last imperial was just a slouching silhouette.
‘You don’t want her, then?’ the soldier pressed, and Che felt her throat go dry. She had little idea of what they were talking about, but she feared what any Wasp intelligencer might do with her.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ she got out. ‘I am a scholar of the College. I know history, politics, economics—’
‘Are you an artificer?’ asked the robed man sharply, as though speaking to an idiot child.
‘I have studied mechanics a little . . .’ She was crippled with honesty even at this moment.
For a moment he studied her. ‘No. Let them rack her for answers. I won’t deprive General Malkan of her.’ With halting steps he turned round and made his way back up towards the sunlight.
It was only when they had gone, and taken most of her hope with them, that she realized that they had not all been strangers.
Why here? It seemed impossible. The sight of her echoed in his mind. Che, down below behind the timber bars.
Oh, Totho could string a sequence of events together, surely. The horror of speculation was wondering what he did not know. Whose bodies now lay amongst the Sarnesh dead on the battlefield? Stenwold perhaps? Tynisa?
Perhaps the Moth Achaeos had perished too.
That thought sent an ugly little thrill through him. If Achaeos was dead . . .
But Che would be dead all too soon, once they had finished cutting and twisting her flesh. General Malkan’s interrogators would undoubtedly want to know everything she could tell them about Sarn, in preparation for his next campaign.
Totho stood and watched Drephos in conversation with one of Malkan’s officers. The general himself was conducting any communications through intermediaries at the moment. That was, Totho had realized eventually, because he was embarrassed. Anyone with eyes could see that Drephos had turned the battle for him, turned the iron tide at the point when Malkan’s men were at their weakest. Drephos had broken the Ant advance and given the Wasps new heart.
Or rather, Totho thought wryly, I did, and nobody knows.
How happy he was for that, and it was not that Drephos had snatched the praise from him, but Totho had hidden away from it, for he had witnessed as closely as he cared the monstrous effects that his inventions had on meat and metal.
Amongst primitive peoples, like the Mantis-kinden, contracts and agreements were sealed with a drop of blood. Well, his contract with Drephos and the Empire was well and truly sealed. He was wading in it, up to his waist already, and with further still to go. And here was Che, suddenly come like his conscience to remind him of all that he had betrayed.
It would serve her right. He hardened his heart. She had never taken the time to think about what she was getting into. Or perhaps it would be a form of justice on Stenwold for sending his own niece into the tempest. Or on the wretched Moth for luring her from safety into this dangerous place. Justice for someone, surely. And that would make some sense of it all.
‘Totho?’
He looked up sharply, seeing Kaszaat walking towards him with concern in her eyes.
‘You’re brooding more than usual. What’s wrong?’
Now here was a woman worth his attention, he told himself. Not too proud to lie with a halfbreed. And she obviously cared about him.
Because Drephos told her to.
‘Totho, what’s wrong?’
She reached out, and he flinched away without thinking.
The look of hurt on her face could have been genuine, and he realized how much he had been poisoned by Drephos, by the Empire, so that he would never be able to be sure with her – or with anyone else – what was real and what was feigned. He had been adopted into a world where everything was weighed in objective scales, valued coldly and then put to work. His credit here was his artificer’s skill and, though he had valued that more than anything, he found it was short measure for his whole life. He was now merely a pair of hands to make, a mind to create: not Totho of Collegium but some working annexe to Drephos’s ambition.
And is that so bad? Because he had lived his entire life, surely, on similar terms. He had worked with the debased currency that his mixed blood could buy him. He had worked twice as hard as his peers, getting half as far. Men with less talent at their graduation than he had possessed from the start had walked straight from the College into prestigious positions of wealth and respect, whereas he, with only real skill to his name, had been accorded nothing. Even amongst Che and Stenwold and the rest he had been the fifth wheel that nobody really needed.
Well, at least here he was needed, and if he was to be valued merely as a commodity, at least Drephos had placed that value high enough to spare Salma’s life in exchange.
But that deal was done, and he had nothing left to barter for Che. I cannot save her.
A simple thing to say, and surprisingly easy.
I cannot just let her die, without a word.
And there was the barb that now caught him. Must he plunge a blade into his own guts by revealing to her what he had become? Or instead live with that emptiness inside him, that lack of a final meeting with her before the end? Or do I merely want her to see that at last I’ve made something of my life?
He clenched his fists, and his mind conjured up the last throes of the doomed Sarnesh charge, bright blood springing from sheared metal as the bolts drove home.
I am become the destroyer. What can I not do? What limits me now?
Che heard the hatch move, but no sun flooded in. Clearly night had come and she had not realized.
One man only, this time, with a covered lantern giving out a fickle light, but her eyes saw him well enough.
She could not be sure of his identity until he had stopped. It was a young man, broad-shouldered and sturdy-framed and marked by mixed blood, and she did not quite know him. She saw the trappings: a toolbelt such as he had always wanted and could never afford, black and gold clothes, a sword and a rank badge. She recognized none of that. It was only when he stood in the cellar, on the other side of the bars, that she was sure.
‘Totho . . . ?’ Her voice emerged in a quaver, not quite believing what she saw. ‘Is it you? It can’t be you.’
He stared at her, and his features were harder than she remembered. Still, there had been harsh times for both of them since they last parted.
‘Totho, don’t just stand there. You have to let me out. You must know what they’ll do to me.’
His face tightened further. ‘I don’t have the keys,’ he muttered, and continued to stare.
‘Totho . . . what are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You went off to Tark . . . why are you wearing that . . . uniform?’
‘Because it is mine,’ he stated, and she began to feel her brief surge of hope draining away.
‘You mean . . . how long?’
He realized that she was seeing their history together unravel backwards, trying to recast him as a spy during all that time, because poor Che didn’t realize that people changed.
‘Since Tark,’ he said. He found it mattered to him that she knew she had already cast him off before he had found his new calling.
‘But why?’ she said, still trying to whisper but her indignation getting the better of her. ‘They’re the enemy, Totho! They’re monsters!’
He felt his anger grow in him. ‘I did it to save Salma,’ he snapped, ‘because otherwise they would have killed him. Or don’t you think that was worth it? Perhaps I should have just died alongside him.’
‘But that’s . . .’ She gaped at him. ‘But you’re free,’ she said, still determinedly marching up the wrong street. ‘You could run, surely, run to Collegium and tell them what happened here.’
‘You have ab
solutely no idea what happened here.’ He felt she was trivializing the sacrifice he had made, and suddenly he was on fire with it. He had never impressed her as a companion, as a warrior, most certainly not as a prospective lover, for all that she had once been life and breath to him. ‘Do you want to know,’ he asked her, voice shaking slightly, ‘what happened here?’
‘I don’t understand, Totho.’
‘I happened here, Che. That’s the simplest thing. Those dead Ants out there – I killed them. When the city of Sarn falls it is I who will break it. When this army or another like it is at the gates of Collegium, it will be me, do you understand? When the Lowlands becomes just the western wing of the Empire, then by rights my name should be on the maps.’
She was backing away from the wooden bars. ‘Totho?’
‘All my doing, Che.’ As she retreated so he had moved up to the bars himself, gripping them as though he were the prisoner here. ‘What your uncle dismissed as a toy back in Collegium, they have made into a weapon here. You remember how I always wanted to make weapons? Well now it’s happened, and my weapons win wars.’
Backing against the far wall of her cell, she stared and saw him at last, as not friend, nor lover, but enemy.
‘You?’
‘All me.’ Now he had her attention, his lust for recognition was leaching out of him, leaving only a hollow bitterness. ‘So I can’t just walk away from this, Che. I have become this. I have paid in blood, and none of it my own.’
‘Oh, Totho . . .’
He waited for her condemnation that he surely deserved, the last gasp of her defiance before the interrogators pried it out of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And the expression on her face told him, beyond any shadow or suspicion, that her concern was purely for him, for her lost friend.
Something was building in him, that hurt worse than burning, but he clamped down on it. He was Drephos’s apprentice. There was no emotion he could not master. ‘Stop saying that.’ He heard his voice shake. ‘I’ve found my place now. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Feel sorry for yourself. You know what they’ll do to you.’ In his mind arose the words, from the depths of his own soul. What they will do to her is nothing, compared to what they have done to me.
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