‘So you think there’s room for good faith?’
Thalric shrugged. ‘Probably not.’ He looked back up at his airship as Aagen returned with . . .
Stenwold felt his heart skip, just as he heard Che exclaim in surprise and delight. He glanced at Thalric, seeing the same hard-to-read expression the man had worn whilst a prisoner at Collegium.
Stenwold rushed forwards just as the woman reached the ground, throwing his arms around her. ‘We thought you were dead,’ he said hoarsely. ‘We’d heard nothing. We thought you were dead, Tynisa! Where have you been?’
She was now shaking in his arms, her face buried in his shoulder, and he realized she was weeping, desperately trying to speak. He held her at arm’s length but she would still not meet his eyes, and eventually he made out her words.
‘I’m so sorry, Stenwold. I couldn’t save him.’
She had something in her hands, two metal tokens, and it was a moment before he recognized the sword-and-circle badges. One was her own, the other . . . The other was the badge that Tisamon had not felt himself fit to wear when he left Collegium. The message was clear.
Stenwold felt as though he had been holding his breath for tendays, in anticipation of this moment. Things left unknown but long suspected had fallen into place, ends tied up. So, he is dead, and it occurred to Stenwold that, of the little band of fools who had set out to fight the Empire all those years ago, he himself was the only survivor. Marius and Atryssa were long gone, Nero and Tisamon so recently, and only he had lived to see their work even half done.
‘Thank you,’ he said to Thalric. Behind him, Che and Tynisa were embracing, not-quite-sisters reunited.
Thalric shrugged. ‘It will never be believed of me, but, left to my own devices I’m an honourable man.’
‘How are things in the Empire – what’s left of it at least?’ Stenwold turned to guide Thalric towards all the waiting delegates and Assemblers.
‘We progress,’ Thalric told him. ‘Seda and her advisors have already managed to convince almost half the Empire that an empress can rule just as well as an emperor. The central cities remain loyal. The South-Empire has disintegrated entirely, a mass of generals and governors and colonels who each of them want to rule the world. We’re taking it back piece by piece. I don’t know what you’ve heard about the West-Empire . . .’
‘I’ve heard enough to know it’s not the West-Empire.’
Thalric smiled at that. ‘We have given a lot of employment to the map-makers recently, haven’t we? No, Myna and Szar and Maynes have made this Three-City Alliance nonsense.’
‘And Helleron has redeclared its independence, I hear – whilst retaining close ties to the Empire, of course,’ Stenwold recalled cynically.
‘Whatever pays the most,’ Thalric agreed. ‘When we start looking west again, none of that will make any difference.’
‘You think it will come to that?’ Stenwold asked unhappily.
Thalric stopped abruptly. ‘I will have to become the diplomat in just a moment, and tell pleasant lies to people. Stenwold, you know there will be war again, between the Empire and the Lowlands. We will all put our names to the truce today, the Treaty of Gold, and everyone will rejoice, but every man who signs it will know that they are writing in water, and that the ripples will be gone soon enough. The truce is convenience, until one of us is ready for war again, and we both know it. I’d like to hope that it doesn’t come in either of our lifetimes.’
Stenwold looked at him and nodded briefly. ‘I believe you in that. Have I misjudged you?’
Thalric shook his head. ‘Not that I noticed.’
Stenwold moved on, then, to join with the other great men of his people, leaving Thalric and his retinue waiting for their formal introduction. Whoever had decreed that the peace should be signed outside the walls of Collegium had not reckoned for the wind today, and vitally important documents were being hurriedly weighted down with stones.
‘Thalric?’ Che approached him almost tentatively. He had been many things to her, after all, comrade and captor and fellow prisoner, undoubted enemy, even doubtful friend.
‘Cheerwell Maker.’ He gave an odd smile, as he looked on her, and she suddenly wondered if he were thinking What if . . . while contemplating a world without the Wasp Empress or the war.
‘I owe you a great deal,’ she said. ‘But that’s all right, because you owe me as well, from before. I’ve done the tallying, and I think I’m in debt to you still, overall. At the end, you did a lot. For Myna.’
She saw him go to make a flippant comment, to shrug it all off, but something dried up the words in his mouth, and instead he just gazed at her sadly. He had told her once how he had a wife back in the Empire, and now imperial writ had decreed a new one for him, and anyway she had felt throughout that the pairings of the Wasp-kinden were merely intended for progeny and convenience. Yet there was regret in that glance of his, a fond regret from a man too pragmatic to act on it.
She hugged him briefly, feeling his armour cold against her, and then let go. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and then they were walking onwards – with treaties waiting to be signed, history to be made.
* * *
The workshop’s owner ducked back into the room, under the sloping ceiling. A garret room and, after the machines had been moved in, precious little space to move about.
‘This is all I can spare you,’ he explained to the solemn young man who followed him. ‘You make good, then maybe you’ll get something better. You waste my time, you’ll regret it, understand?’ His expression was all suspicion and dislike, but it was free of prejudice – because he was a halfbreed, just like Totho was.
Chasme was a city of halfbreeds. Since arriving the day before, Totho had never seen so many. One out of any two of this ramshackle place’s occupants was of mixed blood: Ant and Bee, Spider and Dragonfly, Solarnese Soldier Beetle and Fly-kinden, or a bastard mingling of any combination. A man like Totho attracted no stares.
Oh, he had noticed that many of them were slaves, and many others menials or factory workers. It was not a universal rule, though. Chasme was fluid, not fixed like in the Empire or the Lowlands.
The garret workshop was better than he had hoped. Chasme was a little jewel of civilization on a barbarous shore, powered by the need of Princep Exilla to match the aerial and naval might of Solarno. It was therefore a fortuitous, sheltered little backwater for an artificer to work in.
‘I’d better see something from you before the end of the month,’ the owner warned him. ‘Or you’re on the street.’
‘I’ll show you now,’ Totho said. ‘As a down payment. Just bring me a target mannequin or whatever else you use here.’
The man studied him, narrow-eyed. He himself was of such a mixed ancestry that there was no deciphering it. A flick of his wrist sent one of his slaves off, to return an awkward minute later with a stuffed leather torso on a stand, a mess of patches and rips.
Totho gave a nod for the slave to position it, and he unslung his latest prototype, pumping up the pressure as he did so with ratcheting winches of the handle. It was his showpiece: too delicate for war-work but it made a pretty display.
‘I give you the future,’ he announced, and emptied the snapbow at the dummy, shearing off everything above the navel, even the post that supported it.
The workshop owner said nothing for a long time, to his credit. Totho could almost see money being counted in the man’s eyes. Small concerns, petty profits, but they would outgrow this place soon enough. There would shortly be a revolution here in Chasme. Progress, which had stumbled at the end of the Wasps’ war, would begin its march once more.
‘I’ll leave you to your work,’ said the owner, almost reverently, before turning to go. He stepped aside quickly as Totho’s companion came in, hooded and robed.
‘This will do, for a start,’ Totho said. ‘And they’ve manpower and materials enough for us here in Chasme. I thought we’d complete the arm first, and then . . .’
<
br /> Drephos tugged his hood down, one-handed. ‘And then the future,’ he suggested. ‘And then the world.’
* * *
It became aware of itself between the trees, awakening to agonized existence shot through with thorns and briars.
Where—?
Around it, the forest was twisted and dark, each tree knotted and diseased and forever dying, never quite dead. It knew this place, immediately, instinctively. There was no mistaking it.
The Darakyon.
Yet this was not the true Darakyon, that brooding forest east of Helleron that, for centuries, had turned back or consumed any travellers foolish enough to breach its borders. The true Darakyon lay untenanted now, its ghosts faded from between its tortured boles, the sun breaking in through its matted canopy. The 500-year-old work of the magicians who had blighted it with their hubris had been undone.
So there was only one place that this could be, it knew. It had been touching the Darakyon. It had been part of a great ritual. It was inside the Shadow Box.
Awareness was coming back, and bringing the echo of memories. It – no, he – looked about himself. There was a mist at the edge of the trees now, and it was growing closer. Where it touched, the briars shrank back, the trees themselves faded and were gone.
The Shadow Box had been destroyed. The snarl that it made in the fabric of the world was being unpicked. The world was being dismantled around him, and soon it, and he, would be gone.
For a long moment, watching the greyness creep closer, he could not think why this should be a bad thing. He had not gained such joy out of life, most especially out of the ending of it, that he should wish to protest his extinction. Tree by tree, the heart of the Darakyon was undone, and he, the last inheritor of its power, watched dispassionately.
He had lived a strange and violent life, at odds with his own people, with ambitions utterly alien to the rest of his kind. Would it be so wrong to simply let go now?
Then he remembered some more, shards of his life falling upon him like blades, and he knew he could not go.
No.
No, not like this. He would not give up the world for this grey death-in-death. I have work to do.
He stood, unfolding himself, drawing the stuff of his body from the thorns and the knotted wood and the evaporating darkness.
I have not finished.
It was clear in his mind now. He had something left undone, and there was nobody else who would do it. He bared his teeth at the encroaching nothingness.
There must be a way out. The disintegrating world around him told him that there was no such way, but in life he had never much listened to the rules of others. He dashed from tree to tree, faster and faster, a narrowing spiral as the end came for him. I will not give up. I will not surrender. I haven’t finished. It isn’t over.
And then, at the very last, with the world no more than an arm’s length on either side, he found it.
The ritual, the Darakyon, all those ancient magics torn open and unleashed upon the cold world of the Apt, they were not gone. They lived on in him, for all that he was dead, and . . .
There was another. He felt the distant call of kindred power to power. Out in the world of the living there was another, if he could only find the way.
He stretched out for that faintest of threads, the ebbing reverberation of the Darakyon’s power in the world.
After that was silence: the Shadow Box destroyed, the Darakyon empty, all its tormented prisoners released.
But he was gone before the mist came, pulling himself hand over hand into the world of the living.
I haven’t finished.
He had work to do.
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