Blood of the Mantis

Two

Two months before.

Back in Collegium Stenwold Maker had left Lineo Thadspar and the rest of the Assembly to continue the rebuilding of the city and begin a muster in earnest. War had finally come to Collegium and, though the Vekken enemy were gone, war remained. Collegium was raising troops for the very first time in its history: not a militia but an army. All of the newly formed merchant companies had dispatched recruiters through the little road-towns and satellite villages and these were now busy drumming up men and women willing to take the Assembly’s coin and wear a uniform. The uniforms, however, were likely to be somewhat mismatched. The Assembly had officially adopted the sword and book of the Prowess Forum, in white and gold, and made it a proud badge for the new military, but much of the actual equipment was windfall, and most of the companies had their own ideas about uniformity. Collegium suddenly had inherited a vast number of discarded Vekken mail hauberks, shortswords and crossbows that were barely used, and the Beetle-kinden were always a practical people.

Everyone realized that, come spring, all kinds of chaos would be breaking out, both north and east, and that was why this Sarnesh automotive was now out scouting the terrain. The passengers it carried were little more than an inconvenience.

Stenwold had certainly endured more comfortable journeys in his time, pressed in tight, as he was, between his two bodyguards and the automotive’s crew. Even with Balkus half disappeared into the turret so as to man the repeating ballista, and Tynisa practically squeezed into his armpit, he was still trying to unfold his charts. He finally spread the map as best he could, forcing Tynisa to take one corner herself, while he tried to put in his mind a picture of the conflicting powers: his city’s forces, his enemy and those he hoped would be his allies.

His pieces were all ranked ready for his move. Here was Tisamon, who had taken Stenwold aside and lectured him at length about the responsibility he had taken on: namely the Dragonfly-kinden woman, Felise Mienn. That in turn meant Tisamon had to rub shoulders with her Spider-kinden doctor, which meant more friction as Tisamon and his whole race loathed the man’s breed.

And it was more complicated yet, for Tisamon was the one person Stenwold could trust to look after the Wasp defector, Thalric, who was as murderous a piece of work as anyone could wish to have in custody. Then, on the other hand, Tisamon had no love of Arianna…

Arianna. Stenwold paused at the thought of her: a gem in a sky otherwise denuded of stars, but another defector. He sometimes recognized that look in Tisamon’s eyes that said, I am waiting to prove you wrong.

My friends are driving me insane, thought Stenwold gloomily, and forced himself to concentrate on the map.

There was a Wasp army, or most of one, positioned several miles east of Sarn, but it had not moved since the battle that the Sarnesh had brought against it, and subsequently lost after the deployment of some new Wasp secret weapon. The Sarnesh had inflicted sufficient casualties to cause the Wasps to fortify their position and dig in, while awaiting reinforcements. Information Stenwold received from his contacts in Helleron suggested that those reinforcements would come with the spring – which was likely to see more of death than new life at this rate. He was only thankful that the winter they were on the verge of was forecast to be harsher than the Lowlands normally endured. Certainly it would not be suitable for the movement of massed armies. Even the Wasp Empire stopped for winter.

There had also been a Wasp army of 30,000 advancing on Merro and Egel, further down the coast, but it had been stalled by 200 men belonging to the Spider Aristos Teornis, and then destroyed by the Mantis-kinden of Felyal. Teornis was at Collegium still, wanting to discuss strategy and brimming over with great ideas about how other people’s soldiers could be sent to their deaths, his own having mostly returned to their home ports. Yet another Spider that Tisamon will have to be kept clear of, Stenwold reflected glumly. Also at Collegium was Achaeos, lover of Stenwold’s niece, still recovering from the wounds he took at the Battle of the Rails, together with the Fly-kinden Sperra, who was tending to him. That made up the tally of Stenwold’s people, or so he had thought.

But the Fly-kinden messengers had changed all that: first Nero and then a sullen-faced girl called Chefre. On the strength of their news Stenwold was rushing north-by-east, as fast as a steam-engined automotive would take them.

Abruptly the automotive was slowing. Stenwold looked up from his charts, now crumpled and creased, almost indecipherable in the dim light inside the engine.

‘What is it?’

‘Men ahead, armed men,’ Balkus reported, from the turret, and Stenwold realized he must have mentally shared his visions and thoughts in silence with the Sarnesh driver, for all that Balkus was a renegade. ‘A camp, looks like.’

‘Imperial?’

‘Nothing of that,’ Balkus reassured him. ‘Still, no small number, either. Got someone coming forwards… now a pack of them, a dozen or so.’

Trapped sightless as he was within the automotive’s belly, Stenwold could only sit and fret until he heard the voice from outside.

‘We’ve been watching you for some while,’ someone called out in a Helleren accent. ‘Don’t think we ain’t got the tools to crack one of these things wide open. Better you say who you are, now.’

Stenwold pitched his voice to carry clearly. ‘It’s Stenwold Maker from Collegium. And you must be Salma’s people.’

There was a pause and then: ‘That we are. Come on over, you’re expected.’ The driver obediently followed them within the confines of the camp with the automotive, the tracks crunching and lurching over the uneven ground. Once the engine had stilled Stenwold reached up and unlatched the hatch, letting in a wash of glare from outside.

Tynisa stepped out first, hand ready on her rapier hilt, her movements as lithe and balanced as Mantis and Spider blood could make them. Stenwold followed at her nod of reassurance for, with Tisamon back home watching their prize defector, Tynisa had taken on responsibility for his safety as a trust of Mantis honour. Behind him he heard Balkus now twisting his bulky frame through the hatch, his nailbow clattering against armour-plating.

The camp was a ragged, temporary affair, composed of rough tents and lean-tos without pattern or order. Stenwold guessed that, at the first word of an imperial force heading this way, they could be gone without trace into the surrounding wasteland. There were plenty of convenient gullies and canyons out here in the drylands east of Sarn and, if someone knew the land well enough, they could hide out for ever. And Salma would have followers here who knew every shrub and grain of sand.

There were at least a hundred people in the camp, and Stenwold guessed that half that number again would currently be out scouting or hunting. They were a ragged mix, the lot of them: he spotted at least a dozen separate kinden and a fair crop of halfbreeds. They were all well armed and wearing leather or shell armour, with a few suits of chain. He even saw repainted imperial banded mail amongst them, and plenty of Wasp-made swords. They had been busy, it seemed.

In passing his eyes across them, one familiar gaze met his.

Salma.

The youth had changed so much that Stenwold barely recognized him. He had been reshaped in fire and blood: drained and thinned by injury, toughened by rough living, given gravitas by responsibility. In place of the casual finery he had affected in Collegium he wore a hauberk of studded leather that fell to his knees but was slit into four to let him move freely. He had a helm, too, of Ant-kinden make, also an Ant-made shortsword at his belt, and gripped an unstrung longbow in one hand like a staff. His face was gaunter, his eyes hollower, and there was dust powdered across his golden skin. On first sight he looked like a foreign warlord or brigand chief, savage and dangerous and exotic. So little about him recalled those College days.

‘Salma,’ Stenwold greeted him, and then, ‘Prince Salme Dien.’

‘Just Salma,’ replied the Dragonfly noble. As he stepped forwards, he clasped Stenwold’s hand confidently, and like an equal and not a student. ‘It’s been a while since Myna, Sten.’ His history since their parting was written on his face through bitter experience. His gaze passed on from Stenwold. ‘Tynisa,’ he said.

She was staring at him uncertainly. ‘Look at you,’ she said, ‘all grown up.’ She went to him, one hand held out as though she was not sure he was really there. A moment later her eyes flicked to the woman who stood just behind him, robed and hooded in dun cloth, yet whose skin shone through, whose face glittered with rainbows. An indefinable expression passed over Tynisa’s face, and she looked away.

‘Ah well,’ Stenwold heard her say very quietly.

Salma gazed at her for a moment, the silence dragging.

Stenwold opened his mouth a little, then closed it again. There was tension here he could not account for. He glanced at the rough-looking band of men and women that were the Dragonfly’s followers. ‘Nero told me some of what you’ve been through,’ he managed eventually.

‘He doesn’t know the half of it,’ Salma told him. Something, some dark memory, caught in his voice as he said it.

Are we not grave men of state now, Stenwold thought. As he was about to reply, a woman’s voice cried out in joy and Cheerwell was bundling between Salma’s people, rushing up to Stenwold and throwing her arms about him, sabotaging the dignity of the solemn situation utterly. When Stenwold had finally managed to peel her off him he saw that Salma was smiling. It was not the easy grin of his youth, but it was a start.

‘Uncle Sten, I’ve got something really, really important to show you,’ Che said excitedly.

‘Best save it for Collegium,’ Stenwold told her. ‘We’re close enough to the Wasp army here that I keep looking to the skies.’

‘You needn’t worry,’ Salma told him. ‘I have scouts watching for them, and my people know the land better than they do.’

‘Even so,’ Stenwold said. ‘When you get to my age, you try not to rely too much on anyone else’s information. Let’s get quickly back to Collegium and then we can take stock.’

There was a shuffling amongst Salma’s followers and he said, ‘I won’t be going to Collegium with you, Sten.’

‘No?’ Stenwold watched him carefully.

‘I’m not your agent any more, or your student. I have other responsibilities.’

‘Towards…?’

‘There is a nomad-town of almost twenty-five hundred, people out there that needs me,’ Salma told him. ‘Currently it’s pitched up against the walls of Sarn, and the Sarnesh Queen is waiting for me to explain to her precisely why that is so, and what we want from her. More than that, I have almost a thousand fighting men who are gathered together only because of me.’

‘A thousand?’ Stenwold frowned. ‘I hadn’t heard… Who are they? What is this?’

‘What it is, Sten, is an army,’ Salma said. ‘And who they are depends on who you ask. Deserters, brigands, farmhands, tinkers, lapsed Way Brothers, more and more all the time. The one thing they have in common is that the Wasp Empire is their enemy.’

‘Well, then, the Empire is all of our enemies,’ Stenwold pointed out. ‘I don’t see…’

‘Many of them were slaves,’ Salma explained, leaving a moment’s pause for that statement to echo. ‘Many more are renegades. They trust me, and I am responsible for them. I have not gathered them just to hand them over to Sarn or Collegium as an expendable militia. They are my people, a people in their own right. I call them my New Mercers, but the name they see most often is the Lands-army. We will fight the Empire, Sten, but if the war is won, we will not just disband and return to burned-out farmhouses and servitude or punishment. That is what I will talk to the Queen of Sarn about, and what I will talk to you about, in due course, but… things are now different between us. No fault of yours, but events are in the way. I owe these people my service, just as a prince should.’

‘I understand,’ Stenwold said. ‘Perhaps I begin to, anyway. Your emissaries will always be welcome at Collegium.’ He glanced down at Che, who was looking suddenly unsure.

‘Salma…’ she began.

‘I’m sorry, Che. You’ve seen a little of my work here. You must appreciate my position.’

‘But you could die, if the Wasps catch you. And they’ll try, Salma.’

‘I know.’ He smiled, looking so much older than her. ‘When I was in Tark they killed me once, ran me straight through. If she had not come to me even as I hit the floor, that would have been the end of Salme Dien. After that experience, it’s all borrowed time. I cannot turn from the right thing just because it may send me back to where I have already been.’

‘You’re always doing this!’ Che snapped at him. ‘Why… Why can’t you just come back with us? Salma, I’ve only just found you again, after all we went through… Why does it have to be you that does this thing?’

‘Because it needs to be done, Che, and no one else will do it,’ he told her. ‘And because a prince cannot abandon his people.’

‘Tell me one thing.’ Tynisa’s voice cut across their words, and parted them neatly.

Salma met her gaze fearlessly. ‘Speak.’

‘Does she make you happy?’ Tynisa’s voice barely shook, but the effort needed to keep it steady was plain on her face. Her hand rested on her sword-hilt as Stenwold looked from her to Salma nervously, and Che seemed equally surprised. He recalled that Tynisa and Salma had always been each other’s confidants, but he had not supposed that they were… Or perhaps it was because they had never come so close to one another, but that Tynisa had always hoped they would be, one day.

Stenwold risked a glance at Salma’s people, a few of whom seemed to have picked up a scent of danger. The Butterfly-kinden woman’s face remained serene.

‘Yes,’ admitted Salma. ‘Yes she does.’

A muscle twitched on Tynisa’s face as her eyes sought the glowing face of the other woman. For a moment Tynisa’s emotions were writ so plainly on her face that Stenwold had to look away: For this? she was obviously thinking, weighing her sword skill and her Weaponsmaster’s badge and proud heritage. You turn from me for this?

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Tynisa said to him flatly and turned away, her hand still clenching on the rapier’s hilt.

Only Stenwold saw the faint glitter of tears.

‘I’m making it up, a day at a time,’ Salma said, eyeing her back, ‘but who isn’t?’ His attention shifted. ‘Stenwold, I have something else for you.’ Then he beckoned. ‘Phalmes, let’s have the prisoner.’

A burly Mynan Soldier Beetle hauled up into view someone who had been hidden up until now behind Salma’s warriors. It was a Wasp-kinden in a long coat, with his hands tied behind his back, palm-to-palm.

‘His name’s Gaved, he says. He caught Che as she fled the Wasp army, but we were in time to turn that around. We’ve questioned him and he claims he’s not in their army, just some kind of freelancer.’ Salma tailed off, looking past Stenwold’s shoulder to Balkus, who was pointing at the prisoner, jogging Stenwold’s elbow. ‘What is it, Ant-kinden?’

‘He was in that museum place,’ Balkus stated. ‘Doing the robbery.’

Stenwold stared at the captive, unable to decide whether he recognized him or not. ‘If that’s true, we have more to talk to him about than you might think,’ he advised Salma. ‘You’re happy to hand him over to us?’

‘One more mouth to feed is no good to us, and besides, he doesn’t seem to know much about the Wasp Seventh that’s camped north-east of here. He’s all yours.’

When they were ready to depart, Tynisa was the last to climb into the automotive. Even after Salma and his followers had returned to a camp already being packed up ready to move on, she stared after him, holding her face expresionless with all the craft and Art she had ever possessed.

‘Yes,’ said Achaeos, ‘it was here.’ He looked about the room, once the centre of a rich man’s pleasure, now dusty and untended with just empty cases and stands. The owner’s family had taken everything of value, so only the house itself remained. Collegium’s economy had not yet revived enough for buildings to be changing hands.

‘We caught them in the act, really,’ Arianna explained, watching as the Moth himself, grey-robed and like a dusty shadow, drifted from table to table, his free hand touching everything he encountered. ‘We came in from over there… then there was a Wasp that took a shot at us. Then we were fighting. It was all over very quickly.’ Behind her, at the door, Tisamon remained very still, but she sensed him like a nail in the back of her head. He was here purely to watch her, and she was sure he was just waiting for some perfidy – any excuse to do away with her. Oh, he would wait for the excuse, anything else he would call ‘dishonour’, but there would be no turning back after that.

‘Here.’ The Moth had settled by a small, delicate, wooden table. ‘Right here.’ He leant heavily on his cane, and she saw strain on his grey face that could be due to his injuries or something else. ‘Souls preserve us, how long was it sitting here?’

‘What?’ Tisamon demanded, stepping into the museum room. ‘What was here?’

‘Don’t you feel it? Tisamon?’ Achaeos demanded. Arianna glanced back at the Mantis, and saw a disturbed expression on his face.

‘Yes,’ Achaeos said, ‘you feel something at least, as well you should. In the last of the Days of Lore, Tisamon, when the world was being turned upside-down, there was a ritual performed, a desperate, depraved spell of all spells, and when it went wrong, when it twisted from its makers’ grip, it caused such anguish to the world as you and I and any of us here cannot imagine. Your people and mine, Tisamon, gone rogue from wiser counsel, determined to fight the tide of history by even the foulest means. And they failed, they failed so very badly, so that the unleashed tide of it destroyed the entire hold of Darakyon and bound the twisted souls of its people into the very trees. A taint five centuries old and still not shrinking.’

Tisamon’s jaw was now set, with a certain look in his eyes that Arianna realized was fear. ‘And this… thing?’ he rasped harshly.

‘The heart of the ritual. The very core of the Darakyon. And now it has been stolen,’ Achaeos confirmed.

‘And the Darakyon wishes it…?’

‘Unclaimed. The Darakyon was happiest when it lay here, unknown and unsuspected, unused, surrounded by indomitable walls of disbelief, but now it is out in the world again.’ He looked from the Mantis to Arianna. ‘I do not need to dissemble or blur my words with you. You both know the power that magic can wield. This thing, and I cannot think otherwise, is the most potent relic to survive the Days of Lore, the greatest magic left in the world – and it is dark. You have seen the Darakyon, Tisamon, so you know what I speak of. In the hands of any who knew how to awaken it, its potential for harm would be unthinkable.’

‘Truly?’ Arianna asked. ‘I’ve encountered magicians, and… they aren’t the people our legends tell of: I’ve seen Manipuli turning people’s opinions, tricks with dice, an image you think you see, that isn’t there when next you look. And then some Beetle comes along and tells you it’s all mass hysteria and done with mirrors. And now you’re saying… well, in this day and age, I’m not sure I can see any great magic come to return us to the Days of Lore.’

‘The Days of Lore are gone,’ Achaeos agreed. ‘But to unleash the power contained within this – a box just so big, slightly too large to grip easily with one hand – would change the world. Your Beetles and the rest would not know it for magic, but it would touch and taint them: it would spread darkness in minds and hearts, breed madness, sour friendships and poison loves. And whoever made use of it would be, I’d wager, no more able to control it than its original creators.’

‘And some Spider-kinden now has it,’ Tisamon added, ‘who could be anywhere.’

‘Do you have so little faith in a seer’s powers?’ Achaeos asked him mildly. ‘I know who has it, because I have met with her before. I feel her echo here in this room.’

‘I saw a man,’ Arianna said.

‘Yet she was a woman, nonetheless,’ Achaeos corrected, ‘the same that spied among us in Helleron, taking the face of that halfbreed artificer.’

‘But you killed her!’ Tisamon objected.

‘I thought I had,’ Achaeos said. The rush of magic, in this city of all places, seemed to shake him. Standing in the shadow of the missing box, it was as though all the artifice and craft of the Beetles had never been. ‘I see now I was wrong, for she was here, in whatever guise, and she left with the Shadow Box of the Darakyon.’

‘For where?’ Tisamon demanded. ‘For the Empire?’

‘I will know,’ Achaeos said. ‘Within a day, or perhaps two. I am pressing with all the power I possess and I think that, even at this distance, the things of the Darakyon lend me more strength. They are desperate that the box should not be used, for its possessor would then command them. Soon I will be able to look upon a map and see it there, as plain as writing. Tisamon, will you go with me?’

‘You’re not fit to go anywhere,’ Arianna pointed out. Tisamon gave her an angry glare and she spread her hands. ‘What? He’s injured. Stenwold would have a fit if he knew the Moth was even on his feet.’

‘Yet I must go,’ Achaeos insisted, ‘and I would have you with me, Tisamon – and your daughter too. A swift strike, wherever the box has gone to, to bring it back, safe from harm.’

‘For this I will go as far as the world can take me,’ Tisamon assured her. ‘Tynisa must make her own decisions, but I am with you.’

Achaeos’s blank eyes gave no clues. ‘Thank you, Servant of the Green,’ he said. ‘But we must arm ourselves in knowledge, first.’

‘What knowledge?’ Arianna asked him. ‘Who knows more, of this? Doctor Nicrephos did, but he’s dead. Surely he was the only one.’

‘There is one coming soon who also knows,’ Achaeos said. His words silenced them.

‘How…?’ Arianna’s voice petered out. She had spent a long time amongst the rational Beetle-kinden, but her roots lay with an older tradition. The Spider-kinden had their seers too. ‘You’ve seen…?’

‘Stenwold has snared a rare catch,’ Achaeos explained. ‘Fate’s weave favours us.’

‘Achaeos.’ Tisamon’s tone was flat, but Arianna detected the faint tremor there. ‘You were not… such a seer before, to have such gifted insights,’

‘Save me your tact,’ the Moth said harshly. ‘Oh, I am no great seer, to foresee all things. ‘“Little Neophyte”, they once called me. But now I am led by the nose. They see this. They feed me whatever is needed so that I will dance to their steps. You know who I mean.’

Tisamon flinched, a quick shudder passing through him. Oh, he knows, Arianna realized, and: I want nothing to do with this. This is Mantis magic, and there is no place in it for me.

‘There is to be an interrogation,’ Achaeos continued. ‘I can all but hear the echoes of the questions. Tisamon, I would have you on hand. In case our man proves reluctant.’

In any event it was a day’s waiting before Stenwold could make the arrangements. The locusts of Collegiate bureaucracy had descended on him almost as soon as he reentered the city walls. When the message came it was at very short notice, Stenwold grabbing a free hour and an unused room, and assembling as many as possible to hear what was hopefully to be revealed.

They had Gaved seated at a table in what had once been some administrator’s office. This should be conducted in some place better than this, Stenwold thought. We should have oppressive interrogation rooms, perhaps. But of course the worst Collegium could offer were the cells used by the militia, and rooms here within the College were more convenient. He and Che were sitting at the same table with the prisoner and would have looked like just off-duty academics except for Tisamon’s brooding presence and Achaeos standing as chief prosecutor.

Also except for the fourth man sitting at the table, whom Stenwold was trying not to think about right now.

‘You’re not denying you were part of this theft?’ Achaeos accused the prisoner.

The Wasp shook his head. ‘Your man spotted me right off,’ he shrugged, ‘so what can I say?’

‘You can tell us exactly what you thought you were stealing.’

‘I have no idea what it was,’ Gaved replied. ‘I didn’t even get a good look at it before your mob came piling in.’

Achaeos glanced at Stenwold, who spread his hands cluelessly.

‘Who wanted it?’ Tisamon asked. ‘You must know that.’

The Wasp shrugged. ‘We weren’t told. You don’t ask that in my line of work.’ So far as Stenwold could tell, he was not genuinely holding anything back. Gaved was simply a mercenary, a hunter of fugitives by preference. Stenwold, looking at him, saw a man who knew he was in serious trouble, but without that desperation he would expect of a captured enemy agent with Tisamon at his back. There was, so Stenwold guessed, no great secret that Gaved was holding close.

‘I can tell you what we reckoned,’ the Wasp added, unexpectedly. ‘It makes no difference to me now. The Empire wanted this thing of yours for someone important. Someone really high up, like a general, perhaps, or someone in the Imperial Court. The fellow who gave us our marching orders said as much.’

Achaeos bit his lip anxiously, leaning imperceptibly into Che, who sat very close to him. Their reunion had brought Stenwold more vicarious joy than almost anything else that had happened recently. It had been Che, too, who had unexpectedly spoken up for their captive, so that Gaved was sitting under guard but not bound.

‘Where were you supposed to take the box?’ the Moth asked.

‘Back to Helleron,’ Gaved replied promptly. ‘Believe me when I say I wish I’d never taken on this job. Helleron’s usually as far south as I make it, and I should have kept it that way. This was a fool’s errand: Phin and the Fly dead, and I didn’t even come away with the goods.’

‘Which brings us to your companion,’ Achaeos said carefully. He had already made his suspicions known to Che and Stenwold.

‘Oh, Scylis?’ Gaved said, in tones of disgust. ‘A treacherous bastard, he is. By now Scylis will be living it up in Helleron with all four helpings of our bounty money.’

At which point the last man seated at the table said, ‘Scylis?’

It was the first thing he had said so far. He was similarly unbound, but Tisamon stood close behind him, wearing his clawed gauntlet, and with a stance that said he was looking forward to any attempt at escape.

‘Thalric,’ Stenwold acknowledged his query. ‘The name means something to you?’

It had been an uncertain decision, whether to bring Thalric to this table, but, suspect as he was, he was their authority on imperial affairs, and they had a Wasp to interrogate. The initial reaction between the two men had been one of outright hostility. This was not Gaved hating the deserter but Thalric loathing the mercenary for, despite his turned coat, Thalric’s mind was still black and gold.

‘Oh, I once knew a Spider named Scylis,’ Thalric explained. ‘A very… able agent. Your niece, for one, should have cause to remember him.’

‘We all have good cause, Thalric,’ Stenwold informed him flatly, as Gaved merely looked on frowning. ‘We know something of what this Scylis is capable, and if anyone could walk out of Collegium in the middle of a siege and get all the way to Helleron…’

‘I had wondered,’ Thalric said, with a tinge of mockery in his voice, ‘if you would finally start believing. It took me long enough, but I suppose your Moth there must have helped to persuade you. Sometimes being credulous can be an advantage. If you decide to go after Scylis, little Moth, I would suggest you take care. When he came limping in after catching your arrow, he was not pleased with you at all. If I had provoked Scylis’s enmity I would not get within arm’s reach of anyone else, ever again.’ He smiled until Tisamon shifted slightly, the metal of his claw scraping on the tabletop, and the smile instantly went sour.

‘So Scylis will have passed the box once he got to Helleron?’ Che clarified.

Gaved nodded. ‘That was the original plan.’

‘Then the plan failed,’ Achaeos informed them, ‘for the Shadow Box did not go to Helleron,’ He unrolled a somewhat tattered map across the table. Stenwold studied it but could see little there: the colours and shapes made no real match to places and lands that were familiar to him. It was an old map, he knew, prepared by Achaeos’s own kinden when this city was still theirs. Just as Achaeos could not grasp how to fire a crossbow or turn a key in a lock, so Stenwold could not decipher the way the Moths represented distance and places on a page.

‘I have charted the course of this Scylis, or whoever holds the box,’ Achaeos explained, although of his audience only Tisamon could follow his markings. ‘Not to Helleron, in fact, but some severe detour. A detour north and then east, here to Lake Limnia.’

‘Jerez,’ Gaved said instantly.

‘You know it?’

‘I’ve done good business there,’ the Wasp hunter replied. ‘That’s Skater-kinden land: marsh and swamp, bandit and smuggler country. Imperial writ runs thin there and so that’s where the fugitives go, hoping to get into the Commonweal, or even escape over the northern borders.’

‘So tell me,’ Achaeos said, ‘why take the box there? Nobody would go into the Empire just to get out again. Scylis could have gone straight north from here and found a pass into the Commonweal.’

‘The black market,’ Thalric suggested disdainfully. ‘Skater-kinden, degenerate creatures as they are, they thrive on it.’

‘He’s right,’ Gaved confirmed. ‘You can buy almost anything around Jerez.’ He raised his eyebrows at Achaeos. ‘And sell anything, too.’

‘Then we have to go to Jerez,’ Achaeos decided. ‘Now. Today if we can.’

‘Achaeos, it’s inside the Empire,’ Che reminded him.

‘Just a few of us. Myself. Tisamon and Tynisa,’ he told her.

‘Just for some box?’

‘Che, I have never been more serious in my life,’ he said. ‘You were there in the Darakyon. You saw. I made you see. That is what this is about. You have to trust me.’

‘I do trust you but… you can’t wander in and expect to find Scylis just… sitting there on this box, waiting to hand it over. I don’t care how thin imperial law runs there, it’s still the Empire.’

‘Then we shall take a guide,’ the Moth said simply.

Unwillingly, Che found her eyes being dragged down the length of the table towards Thalric. He and Gaved had both been her captors, and she had made her escape from each before they had truly had a chance to make her rue it. She saw the difference between them: Gaved had some quality in him, something that told her he might have handed her over to worse men but not touched her himself. Thalric had merely been putting off the moment when she would have screamed beneath his artificer’s knife, but it would have come sooner or later. His iron sense of duty would have subjected her to such torture without remorse.

Stenwold opened his mouth to issue one of his usual blanket refusals, but it was clear in his face that he was unsure whether being in the Empire without a guide would be worse than being there with one.

‘If he comes with us, I shall watch him,’ Tisamon supplied, ‘and he knows what I will do to him if he betrays us. There is nowhere in the Empire or beyond that will then shelter him.’

‘And I’ll watch him too,’ Che added.

‘No,’ Achaeos said, and she had been so ready for Stenwold to forbid her that it was her uncle she glared at before realizing whose voice had actually spoken.

‘There is nobody I would rather have as my companion,’ the Moth told her, ‘as you know. But this is a task not fit for you. Stealth and secrecy, Che. A handful of us and no more, to find the box as swiftly as we may, then seize it without fail, and return. I would not involve you in this, as I would not bring along Stenwold or the Ant Balkus.’

‘But…’ She looked half angry with him and half aggrieved.

‘Your uncle will have other tasks for you, I am sure,’ he reassured her. ‘We all must play our parts. I am already taking from him two of his closest allies and, Master Maker, you cannot understand why I must do this, but I must. Tisamon has agreed, and Tynisa also, I am told. Will you allow us Thalric? He was a spymaster of the Empire, so he will have ways of hearing things, uncovering things, that we don’t have.’

Stenwold glanced at the ex-Rekef major whose face remained a watchful blank. ‘I am a fairly decent judge of people,’ he said. ‘Remember, I have been in the intelligence game for twenty years, almost: that gives me the right to say no more than that I am a decent enough judge. I do not trust you, Thalric, and I would almost rather have Tisamon kill you here and now than risk your betrayal. I know you will attempt one.’

‘Then you have more foreknowledge of my future than I do,’ Thalric said implacably. ‘What would you have me swear by? I seem to have lost most of the things I used to own.’

‘Gaved,’ Stenwold turned to the Wasp seated at the far end. ‘A word with you.’ He stepped away from the table, far enough that his low tones would be lost to those who waited for him. Gaved rose, his eyes fixed cautiously on Tisamon, and followed him. Stenwold looked him over once more, registering the long greatcoat made of tough leather that had seen patches added and tears stitched up in its time, and noting the burn-scar on his face, the self-consciously unmilitary posture.

‘So you’re a mercenary, indeed?’

‘I try to be.’

‘That can’t be an easy resolution to keep, for a Wasp living inside the Empire.’

Gaved studied him for a long moment, then lowered his eyes. ‘That’s true, and I do work for Empire coin, on matters too shabby for the Rekef and too delicate for the army. But I work for others too, Master Maker, private work, for those that pay: tracing, hunting, finding.’

‘You value your freedom?’

‘All the more for it being hard come by.’

Stenwold shook his head. ‘I had not thought that a Wasp might be just as much a prisoner of the Empire as any of its slaves.’ He met Gaved’s suspicious gaze again. ‘I have a commission for you.’

‘You want me to go after this box?’

Stenwold was watching him closely, watching every blink of his eyes. ‘I have the impression you know the country?’

‘Better than any save the locals. My trade does well there.’

‘I will pay some now, some later, in good coin, if you would go with them, aid them in their task and, most especially, keep an eye on Thalric,’ Stenwold told him.

‘So you trust me, do you?’

‘More than him,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘Once the box is recovered, you can even make your own way home, if you want, although it will mean missing half of your money.’

Gaved took a deep breath. ‘The Empire hired me to find that same trinket, Master Maker. That contract’s dead to me, if you now hire me, but…’ He shrugged, groping for the right words.

‘But how can I know for sure that you won’t sell us out?’ Stenwold finished for him. ‘I had considered myself a fair judge of men of any kinden, and by asking that question you’ve confirmed my judgment.’

Gaved looked away from him back to the group gathered around the table. ‘And your Mantis will kill me if I so much as look at him in a funny way?’

‘Of course,’ Stenwold agreed.

Gaved smiled slightly. It tugged at the burn-scar and did little to enhance his features. ‘You have a deal, then.’