Empire in Black and Gold sota-1

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘And?’ Stenwold asked.

  ‘They do accept that — that none of us betrayed them.’ And only the briefest catch in Tisamon’s voice revealed how recently he had been forced to accept it himself. ‘We have been comparing memories. Totho?’

  The artificer started. ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Tell them about Helleron. About the man you met there.’

  Tynisa opened her mouth as if to speak, looked from Tisamon to Totho. The artificer glanced at her but Tisamon was waiting for his answer, and the Mantis plainly intimidated him more than Tynisa could. So, in his halting way, Totho gave the plain facts of what had happened to Bolwyn, and how it was that a dead man had met them in Benevolence Square. He could not keep the disbelief from his voice, but he spoke only the facts as he had witnessed them.

  Chyses and the other Mynans appeared as sceptical as he himself was, looking to Tisamon for some explanation.

  ‘We have named all those who knew about the original plan,’ Tisamon said, ‘many of whom died in the conquest. We can find no weak link, and yet our plan was betrayed. I think that there was a spy, indeed, but he might have been wearing the face of another.’

  ‘But that’s not possible,’ Khenice said from behind him. ‘We knew them all intimately and you couldn’t disguise-’

  ‘This man could,’ Tisamon interrupted her. ‘You heard the story: a perfect likeness.’

  They still did not seem convinced, and Stenwold could not blame them. His own rational mind told him that such things were impossible. He had travelled more than most, though, and in stranger company, and had been forced, in the past, to accept that there were things in the world he could not account for.

  ‘Where is this leading you?’ he asked the Mantis.

  ‘We may not be secure,’ Tisamon warned. ‘Even now we could be compromised.’

  Stenwold put his head in his hands. ‘Anything is possible, Tisamon, but I can’t leave Cheerwell and Salma in their hands. I have to try.’

  ‘Then let me scout the way first, that’s all I ask. I will go now, with whatever directions our friends here can give me. There will be no time yet for a trap to have been set for me.’

  Chyses stood up. ‘And one more thing.’ He and Tisamon faced one another with a kind of generalized mutual dislike, two aggressive men confined in a small space. ‘You can’t trust us, is what you’re saying. We can’t trust you, either. When you do go to retrieve your friends, then Master Stenwold here will stay with us as surety. If you don’t get Kymene back for us, then it will go badly for him.’

  Stenwold sighed. Their relationship with the Mynan resistance was getting rockier by the moment. He nodded in response to Tisamon’s enquiring look. Besides, let them think I’m just a fat old man. He might surprise them yet, if this went sour.

  ‘Give me your best directions,’ Tisamon instructed. ‘I care nothing for your plans and drawings.’ Chyses bristled at the tone, but nodded, went across the cellar for the maps.

  When Tisamon departed, Tynisa followed him.

  Problem after problem. Stenwold felt them weighing heavily on him.

  ‘Master Maker,’ Totho spoke at his elbow.

  ‘I’ve told you, you don’t need to-’ The moments of his last conversation with the youth came back to him and he grimaced. ‘Yes, Totho?’

  ‘We still don’t know how the Moth knew that Che and Salma were here, sir.’

  Stenwold frowned at him. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘That it could be a trap, like Tisamon says. A trap because he’s set one.’

  Stenwold glanced about the cellar, trying to find Achaeos. The Moth was almost hidden in the shadows across the room, sitting on his own in a nook of crumbling masonry.

  ‘If he wanted to throw us to the Wasps, he has had ample chance. He even warned us of the ambush, before Asta. I cannot say precisely why he has linked his path to ours, Totho, but I feel sure it’s not to sell us out, or not to the Empire.’

  ‘But. . I still don’t trust him, Master Maker. I can’t. Everything about him. .’

  Stenwold looked into the boy’s honest face, that was itself stamped with a halfbreed taint others despised on sight. Is this what they have taught you, by hating you? But that was not the reason, he realized. Totho and Achaeos had loathed one another from the moment that they met, and Stenwold had no idea why.

  Achaeos himself was finding it every bit as difficult to disentangle his motives. He had heard enough of Chyses’ plans to find them fraught with danger. The time had come to ask himself whether he should even be here, let alone accompany the others on this lunatic’s assault. The Mynan people — these Soldier Beetle-kinden as they called themselves — he found hostile and ill-favoured, and he had no faith in them or in their captured leader.

  And yet he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was not able simply to sever his ties and fly away. It was not that he was already so deep within this Empire that the Wasp-kinden seemed to have built for themselves. He had no doubt he could find enough shadows between here and Tharn to cover his retreat. It was because he had, in his moment of madness, gone begging to the Darakyon. He had sought and received its help, and that had been for a purpose. He had told the things of the forest that he would rescue Cheerwell Maker. And, whilst riding their power, he had told her that he was coming for her. He had not meant to bind himself so irrevocably to this course but, now he came to recollect, he felt that he was indeed wholly bound.

  Magic was a force that pushed: this he knew from his youngest days. What it pushed upon was a fabric that underlay the world, a weave beyond the weave. Perhaps the fabric was not so strong now as it once was, since the Apt minded and their machines were wearing it threadbare. Still, it was there, and the cunning man learned to pull its threads and to twist the way it hung. That was the secret of their spy, of course: that had been an honoured calling back in the Days of Lore before the damned revolution. It surprised Achaeos to find that there was a practitioner left, but what other trade could so effectively hide itself from the world?

  He cast his gaze, that knew neither shadows nor masks, across the assembled rebels and their uneasy guests. He felt there no tuggings at the weft of magic, but if such spies were as good as their legends, he probably would not anyway.

  He saw the halfbreed artificer glaring at him. No love lost there and yet Achaeos was not entirely sure why. He had plenty of cause to hate back, of course. The Apt were driving his people into cultural, even physical extinction, so it should be he who nurtured a grievance. Instead, it was this young man with the world apparently in his hands, and Achaeos wondered what it was he was missing.

  If he was honest with himself he felt he already knew, but he was not ready to be honest with himself. Honesty — now there was a wound that was slow to heal.

  It was going just like before, and Tynisa was losing patience.

  Within minutes of leaving the resistance cell she had virtually fallen into step with him, just like their scouting of the Asta slave pits, just like their entry into Myna and their ambush of Chyses’ people. He had instantly adjusted to her and, without any signal, any conversation, they were become a hunting pair. Every move he made was informed by her own, as hers was by his. He did not need to look at her, to signal to her, to wait for her. Some part of him trusted her implicitly to be in exactly the right place, to do the right thing.

  Yet when they were back with the others, she knew it would be gone again, this link she was now sharing with him. Not only gone, he would not admit of its existence. He would blot her out, refuse to deal with her.

  She had a hook inside her now, and it had been pulling at her ever since she had discovered the truth. From the comfortable illusion of being Stenwold’s daughter, however implausible that might have been, she had been thrust straight into another world. It was a harsh-edged world, and it gave her a mother long dead, and this man, this distant, impossible man, as a father. She needed to confront it, but he would not let her. Tisamon simply retreated from it. />
  He was a coward, she told herself. He was the great Mantis Weaponsmaster, of course. He could kill a hundred men just by sneezing. He was a coward, though. He had met something beyond his courage, and he was ignoring it.

  They had followed the directions that Chyses had given. The sewers beneath Myna were ancient — ancient and huge. In places they had been more vast than some of the halls of the Great College, their monumental stones overgrown with algae, their sides slippery with grey moss. Sometimes from the broad walkway on one side to that on the other was a watery gap of ten feet. Myna was a city but by no means grand enough to warrant such extravagant plumbing. There had been carvings, too, but too effaced by time and the elements to be made out, no clue as to the builders of this fallen place that even the Mynans had mostly forgotten.

  At one point they emerged into a square, as though these sewers had been a whole city in their own right once. There was a broken-off stump of a statue there, just worn feet and the jagged lower edge of robes, but time remained mute and kept its secrets.

  Things moved in the water that she did not get a proper look at, and roaches half the size of a man scuttled away from the dim light of the hooded lantern Tisamon bore. It gave out barely a gleam, but they both had eyes able to take that gleam and use it to best effect.

  The directions had been good and Tisamon’s recall of them perfect. The resistance movement had taken its time in plotting these sewers that had become its main thoroughfare. In less time than Tynisa had imagined they had found some more recent architecture. Before Governor Ulther had raised his great palace as a symbol of his supremacy there had stood here the Consensus where the senate and tribunes of Myna would meet to argue policy. Even a seat of government requires its sewers, and more than that. Though the structure above ground had been banished, the cellars remained, tucked down beneath the later cells and storerooms that the Wasps had excavated.

  They had found the narrow stairs exactly where Chyses had indicated. Tisamon had padded up them first to reach the hatch there, which a sympathizer serving within the palace secretly kept unbarred. With no more fanfare than that they had slipped into the palace itself. Where they entered had been a mere grain cellar, but they now stepped where Wasp feet had recently trod, and the resistance’s plan was thus vindicated. Tynisa had wanted to press on then, to find Che and Salma on their own. But a single exchange of looks with Tisamon had dissuaded her. They needed more hands, and they had made a deal with Chyses. Tisamon took his word as seriously as his life; it was a Mantis thing, but she could grasp it if she reached far enough.

  And then they were on their way back, to report that the plan was sound, that it could be accomplished, and she knew that as soon as they were done, their shroud of silence replaced with the need to speak, then she would be shut out by him again. It was like before, at Asta, or when they crept over the walls of Myna itself. He would take it back, take it all back, and then he would hate her again.

  And she made up her mind then, When Che and Salma are free I will force you to recognize me, you bastard. I will force you on the blade’s point, or I shall make you kill me, because I cannot live with this indifference.

  Twenty-seven

  Thalric returned to his chambers and methodically ensured that everything essential he owned was ready to take on his person. He laid out his sword and swordbelt, his pack with writing kit and paper and all the imperial documents he carried. He then took out his most valuable possession, for a man who travelled light. It was a short-sleeved shirt of copper-steel mesh, made somewhere far beyond the Empire’s borders. They were highly sought after, far more in demand than could be satisfied by the thin trickle of supply that reached the imperial markets by the Silk Road. He had been lucky to find it, for copper-weave armour was normally a perquisite of generals and statesmen.

  He stripped off his tunic and put the garment on. Its thin layer of cloth backing was cool against his chest. When he put another tunic on, with sleeves down to the elbow, no watcher would guess at the thin layer of metal next to his skin.

  He then buckled his swordbelt, wondering how much time he still had. The thought that at the end Ulther might stay loyal did not occur to him. He had lived with treachery long enough to hear its tread on the stairs.

  And such a simple net to catch a man who was governor of Myna: to take his toys away and wait for the tantrum. If Thalric had been sentimental he would have been bitterly disappointed. In fact, he now admitted, he was disappointed. He should not have had to do this, not to Ulther, who had once been his friend and patron.

  But the story that Hreya had told him had been clear enough: Ulther was a man of appetites. The great warrior of two decades before had become today’s petty tyrant. Myna was his city and he ran it for his personal delectation and that of his cronies, his sycophants, as the woman Kymene had called them. For a man of Thalric’s trade it had not taken long to uncover the signs. The imperial tallies did not tally. There were goods and coin going missing, far more than the mechanical supplies that Aagen had come here to chase. The war that was being constructed in Asta was months behind schedule, stinted at every turn as Myna was made a chokehold in the imperial supply lines. What Ulther did not appropriate himself, his parasites soon made off with. The black market of Myna was growing fat on war supplies that the Empire could not afford to lose.

  Ulther was grown drunk on power, and his henchmen were growing fat on the Empire’s tax money and war funds. Meanwhile the city itself had been on the brink of explosion for years. Ulther had done a good job of keeping it from boiling over, but it was still seething, and Thalric had seen enough damaging reports. Even incarcerating Kymene had not been a real blow to the resistance because Ulther had seen her as a trophy and not an opportunity. The good man Thalric once knew had become a liability, had become a burden on the imperial war machine, a cancer that must be operated upon immediately, if the Empire was to exercise its full strength against the Lowlands.

  So Colonel Latvoc had been right, in the end. He had even been right, in all probability, to send Thalric. That did not mean that Thalric had to like it, however.

  He drew his blade, examined its surface for rust. It did not see as much wear as it should, but then a good Rekef agent seldom needed to fight in person. This time it would be different, though.

  He looked up. ‘You can come out now,’ he said. ‘You’re fooling no one.’

  He could not, in fact, have said where the watcher was, although he knew he was being watched. The shadow that moved was outside the window, someone crouched on the sill beside that narrow aperture. With an impressive display of dexterity a small figure squeezed through an opening never intended as an entrance, and descended to the floor in a glitter of wings. It was te Berro, Latvoc’s man.

  ‘How am I doing?’ Thalric asked dryly.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ Te Berro dusted himself off. He was wearing a shapeless white robe, like many of the local Fly-kinden, but Thalric saw a bulge that must indicate a dagger hilt.

  ‘The lines are drawn. They’ll move against me soon,’ Thalric said. ‘Ulther will go and wrestle with his conscience for a while, but his greed will pin it easily. Then he’ll send men after me.’

  ‘Do you require help?’ te Berro asked him. ‘The Rekef Inlander have a few hands in the city, low ranked mostly.’

  That would be a blessed abrogation of responsibility, to step aside and let the Rekef deal with his old mentor.

  Thalric shook his head. ‘I’ll do it. If it’s possible, I’ll do it. But keep an eye on me, in case.’

  ‘If so, we may be too late.’

  ‘Then so be it.’

  ‘Your prerogative, of course.’ Te Berro nodded. ‘Good luck, Major Thalric.’ The Fly’s wings blurred at his shoulders and he hopped to the window ledge.

  ‘Lieutenant. .’

  ‘Major?’

  Thalric took a deep breath. ‘You’ve been on Colonel Latvoc’s staff for how long, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Over a
year now, sir.’ As te Berro crouched at the window, it was impossible to know whether the question made him uncomfortable.

  ‘If he wants Ulther dead, why not just kill him?’ The words dropped like lead. Te Berro stared, trapped suddenly in a conversation he had no wish to be a part of.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We are the Rekef, te Berro. City governors choke on their meat or fall out of windows or cut their throats shaving, same as everybody else. Why this charade?’

  ‘You think he tells me anything?’ te Berro said, hurrying the words out before they could be used against him. ‘You’ve made your investigation. You’ve found a reason to convict him. Be happy with that, Major. Be happy that it will all look legitimate when Ulther’s friends come calling.’ His face twisted slightly. ‘Besides, maybe it’s not really Ulther they’re interested in. Maybe it’s you, Major?’ His wings sprang dustily into existence, and a moment later he had contorted his way out of the narrow window and was gone.

  By the sputtering, ghostly light of their artificial lamps Achaeos heard them whisper about the hands that built these ancient sewers. He rolled his blank eyes at it all but knew enough to stay silent.

  There were enough of the lichen-overgrown and defaced carvings left for him to recognize the ancient structure as his own people’s handiwork. So Myna had once been a city of the Moth-kinden, so long lost now that even Tharn was unaware of it. But no, somewhere high enough up in the echelons of his masters that knowledge would remain. There was precious little of the past that they did not know. Knowledge was a currency in Tharn, and it was guarded more jealously than gold, even from their own kin.

  Achaeos wondered whether they ever thought of him, wished him luck or wondered if he still lived. By this evening that might be a moot point.

  He, who had so often troubled the world for news of the future, now felt trapped by the strings of fate. A chain of happenstance had tethered him to this moment, as surely as if he had become a slave of the Wasps himself. He had not intended any of it. He had merely sought Elias Monger’s stables as a brief hiding place. He would have been gone at nightfall, and nobody would have been the wiser — if not for that meddling woman.