Blood of the Mantis

Six

There was a strange hush amongst his fellow Moth-kinden as Achaeos returned through the lightless halls to his fellows. His thoughts were so soured by the Skryre’s words that he barely noticed, barely even registered, that here, in his birthplace, something was very badly wrong.

He had expected to find his comrades crouched shivering against the walls, but they were on their feet and ready waiting for him, practically dragging him into the room.

‘Where have you been?’ Allanbridge demanded.

‘Never mind that. We should leave now. There’s nothing for us here,’ Achaeos said heavily.

‘Blasted right we should leave!’ the Beetle said. ‘They’re coming!’

Achaeos stared at him. ‘They?’

‘Some of your people flew in just now,’ said Thalric. He was sitting in one corner of the room, the only one not standing, and as far away from both Tisamon and Gaved as space would allow. ‘The Empire is coming, Moth. As of a few hours’ time, this will be imperial territory.’

A hammer struck somewhere in Achaeos. He had known, surely he had known, and yet it was a different thing to be told of it as a certainty. I have to help them fight was the only thought that came to him. His hands already itched to string his bow.

He glanced at Tisamon, because he found that of all of them it was the Mantis whom he trusted most. Tisamon nodded once. His clawed gauntlet was on his hand, and he was spoiling for battle.

‘Your people are just… standing about,’ Tynisa added. ‘They’re not even armed. They’re just standing there, crowds of them, just waiting.’

They have a plan. The Skryre had said as much. He only hoped it was a good one. ‘I don’t think they’re going to fight,’ he announced.

‘Well, your people are supposed to be wise,’ Thalric said. ‘I once saw an air-armada during the Twelve-Year War. They pitched up against a castle on a hill and pounded it with leadshotters until it had become a castle in the next valley. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of fragile carving on this mountain of yours.’

‘I don’t mean to sound tactless, but can we bloody go?’ Allanbridge demanded. ‘Look, they’ll have glasses scouring every inch of your fancy stonework out there. What do you think they’ll do, if they see an airship leaving this place?’

‘You’re right,’ Achaeos decided. Allanbridge’s Buoyant Maiden was tethered closely, only a precipitous scramble. ‘Come on.’ Achaeos skipped out into early-morning air that was just lightening.

Allanbridge clambered next out through the wall-opening, clinging to the sheer mountainside by Art alone, and Tynisa followed behind him, then came Gaved who flew straight to the gondola and began preparing to cast off. Tisamon stayed back, having seen the pensive look on Thalric’s face.

‘You’ll get on that flying machine or I will kill you,’ the Mantis warned.

‘You think I’d jump ship now?’ Thalric snorted. ‘There’s nothing for me here. They’d hold me until they worked out who I was, then I’d be just as dead as the rest of you.’ Still, there was clearly a tinge of regret in him as he climbed through the window and made his way along the narrow ledge, wings flicking occasionally to retain his balance. Tisamon watched him, wondering whether he was really too injured to risk taking flight, or whether this was just an act.

As soon as the Mantis had finally joined them, running lightly along the ledge and jumping for the gondola, Gaved cast them off. Allanbridge instantly released the clockwork driving the engine and the propellers flew into life amid a delicate whir of gears. He then put the tiller into the wind and adjusted the vanes, and the Buoyant Maiden slowly began to tack away from Tharn.

‘Look,’ pointed Tynisa, who was at the rail, leaning out. Beneath a cloudy sky there could be seen distant flecks of darker matter. The Wasp air-armada was on its way.

‘Airships,’ Allanbridge observed. ‘Big ones too, a half-dozen at least. Can’t see any small stuff from here without my ’scope.’

‘I can,’ Tynisa told him. ‘I can’t count them up, but I think three dozen fliers.’

‘Not to mention probably about two thousand of the light airborne,’ Thalric added. He had not even come over to look. ‘They’ll have them clinging to the dirigibles, everywhere they can, all wrapped in their woollies. I would, too, if I were in charge.’

‘Do you know who will be leading them?’ Achaeos asked him, ‘and what… what will they do to my people?’

Looking back, they could see crowds of Moths lining the balconies and entrances of Tharn, hundreds of robed figures standing, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight. There were others amongst them: Fly-kinden and Mantis warriors. Way below, even the farmers had not gone to bed with the moon but now stood silently in their tiered fields, waiting, waiting.

‘That’s no proper army,’ Thalric said, almost contemptuously. ‘An expeditionary force – that’s all your city merits. They’ll have picked some officer to appoint governor of this place, if your people roll over. Nobody important, though. It’s not as though this backwater has anything anyone would want.’

Achaeos rounded on him, fists clenched. Thalric raised an eyebrow.

‘What?’ he asked. ‘Remember, you brought me along as your imperial advisor. Don’t ask questions if you don’t want the answers.’

‘I hate to break up a pair of friends,’ Allanbridge told them, having come back abovedecks, ‘but we’ve got a problem.’ He had a telescope out now, and had been raking it across the distant airfleet. ‘They’ve spotted us sure enough.’ Seeing Achaeos’ expression he continued, ‘You forget we’ve got a real big balloon above us, and the dawn catches it just lovely. I count a couple of fixed-wings now coming to pay us a visit.’

‘Then make this machine go faster,’ Achaeos demanded.

‘It doesn’t work like that, boy. They’re just plain faster than we’ll ever be.’

‘But what will they do?’ Achaeos remembered flying machines duelling during the Battle of the Rails. ‘How can we fight them?’

‘Ah, well, that’s the real problem,’ Allanbridge replied. He opened up a locker and brought out a big repeating crossbow with a latched hook that he now rested on the gondola’s rail.

To Achaeos it seemed impossible that they should ever be caught. The airship was sculling along with a brisk wind, passing perilously close to the mountainside yet always being gusted past it. He himself would be hard-pressed to fly this fast for very long. So how fast could the Wasp machines be?

It was an agony of waiting, but soon he could see the fliers as twin dots against the sky, keeping close together, imperceptibly growing in size as they neared. But still the Buoyant Maiden clipped ahead, making more and more distance from Tharn, and yet not widening the gap at all.

Tisamon had gone down into the hold and now he reappeared with a bow, a proper Mantis longbow as tall as he was, and strong enough that he was forced to lean heavily into it to bring it to the string. On seeing this, Achaeos strung his own bow, which seemed pitiful in comparison. Nearby Tynisa stood with her hand on her rapier, looking angrily impotent.

She spoke to Achaeos but her eyes were on the growing specks. ‘What happened with your people?’ He sensed she merely wanted to blunt the edge of her frustration.

‘Precious little. They will not help us. They would prefer to cast me out. They are… they’re scared.’

‘Of the Wasps, you mean?’

‘Of the box.’

Her eyes widened. ‘I’d have thought that would be their very thing.’

‘I thought they would help – that they would appreciate what I’m trying to do. But no, they… they, who are wiser than I am, are afraid of it. They paint it as something that twists anything it touches. And…’ He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable.

‘And?’ she prompted.

‘And they may be right. I think it has begun to work on me already.’

Something zipped overhead, and they ducked simultaneously. Looking over the stern rail, Achaeos discovered the two flying machines were now close enough for him to see two men riding in each, one that must be directing it, while the other, sitting above and behind, was aiming some kind of big crossbow. The nearest of the two had begun loosing a few ranging shots.

Tisamon joined the pair of them at the stern, pulling his bowstring back level with his ear and waiting, his arm unflinching.

A crossbow bolt ploughed into the balloon above them, and then two more as the enemy repeater found its range. Tisamon loosed, sending an arrow flashing through the open air, but the shaft shattered against the hull of the enemy machine, and he cursed and reached for another.

‘Will the canopy hold?’ Gaved shouted.

‘I told you, it’s Spider silk and those bolts are just hanging in it. That’s not what I’m worried about,’ replied Allanbridge. He had repositioned his own repeating crossbow on the back rail, but then Gaved suggested, ‘You stay with the engine. I’ll do the shooting.’

‘Against your own folk?’

‘They won’t make any allowances for me if they catch us.’

The two fliers were diverging now to pass by the airship on either side. Tynisa saw that they had two sets of fixed wings and a rear-facing engine, not so different from a craft she had ridden in once, when escaping another airship. She ducked as a crossbow bolt clipped the rail beside her, and just then Tisamon let fly his second arrow. The distance was considerable, but the Wasps had pulled in close to be within crossbow range, and Tisamon’s great bow proved equal to it. The shaft flew true and the man handling the crossbow reeled back with its thin spine jutting from his shoulder.

Achaeos now loosed too, watching his shaft fall short and vanish into the air. On the other side, the second craft was drawing closer, the crossbowman tilting his weapon upwards, still engaged in pumping shots into the balloon, whilst the pilot stretched out a palm towards them. In the next moment the Wasp’s sting flashed at them, but it was nothing more than light by the time it reached them. They saw the flier pull in closer still.

The machine to port was falling further away but overtaking them, with the crossbowman trying to pull the arrow from his body. On the other side the flier was getting recklessly close, and when the sting lashed out again it charred the railing. Then Gaved was shooting back, exchanging shots with the crossbowman on the fixed wing. A bolt ploughed into the imperial flier’s hull up to the fletching, and the flier reeled with the impact, a fine spray of liquid misting from the hole. Then Gaved himself fell back with a cry as a bolt split the rail and peppered him with splinters.

Tisamon and Achaeos were both loosing arrows now but the Wasp pilot swung the flier in and out erratically, letting the curve and plate of the hull take their arrows.

Thalric stepped forwards, his jaw set, and threw an open hand out towards it. summoning the Art of his people.

With this step, I sever one more tie. His own sting lashed out, not at the men but at the machine itself, where the crossbow bolt had pierced the fuel tank. Instantly the flier was trailing fire. He had time enough to see the horror on the face of the pilot, his own kinsman, before the man pulled the fixed-wing into a dive, trying to get to land before the whole fuel tank caught. Thalric followed them with his eyes as far as he could, but the flier was soon out of sight beneath the airship.

Then the second machine was coming back, the cross-bowman trying to manage his weapon one-handed and shooting erratically. Tisamon ran to the prow and nocked another arrow.

The flying machine was speeding straight for them. Tisamon held his breath, string pulled back all the way, and then let fly.

The arrow almost clipped the lip of the pilot’s seat before piercing the man’s armour and burying itself in his chest. The flying machine suddenly went arcing upwards, performing an absurdly graceful loop before plummeting earthwards. The wounded crossbowman kicked out, letting his own wings carry him down. Soon they were both out of sight.

‘Will they send more?’ Tynisa asked Allanbridge. ‘If they’re so much faster than we are?’

‘Faster indeed,’ he said. ‘But they’ve got just the smallest tendency, those fancy fliers, to run out of fuel. My girl’s got a good westerly blowing her the right way, you see, and even if her engine winds down, well, we won’t drop from the sky. No, they’ve had their chance. They’ll not catch us now.’

I am so very far from home, was his thought now, so many days after their escape from the flying machines, as Achaeos felt the encroaching of the night that, for most of his life, had been a time for waking and doing, rather than trying to sleep. I am so very far from her.

Magic was a remedy for that – magic that shunned the waking, sunlit world, but whose chiefest currency was dreams and visions.

In his mind’s eye he had found her, Che, sleeping on a broad bed draped with silken sheets, curled up like a child with a slight smile on her face. His heart leapt to see her there. He had thought he felt her absence, before he tried this scrying, but he had not known just how much so until he bid her face appear in his mind.

‘Che,’ he said softly. ‘I know you are asleep. I have touched you before, like this, when the need was utmost. Now I have found you again so easily. It must be because I love you.’

He knew he had no guarantee that she would ever hear his words, even in her dreams, or that those dreams would be recalled on her waking, but he needed to talk to her, to touch her. Just looking at her made his heart ache, yet it was a love abhorrent to his entire kinden, seemingly against all reason, and despite that one that could not be argued with.

Che, I need to show you what I see, here. We have reached the town of Jerez, you see, which is like no place I have ever been to. I want to show it to you.

Her surroundings – the blur of them that he could make out – seemed almost palatial, with white stone, tapestries and rugs, a window with ornately worked shutters. It was a far cry from the heap of sticks in which he himself was spending the night, and which passed for a house here in Jerez.

He rose from the filthy mat of crushed reeds and went over to the doorway, looking out at Lake Limnia in all its sordid splendour.

I know your city lies by a lake or a sea, Che. Well, this is my lake. It was blood-red with the sunset and, although a far smaller stretch of water than the Exalsee in the distant south, it encompassed his entire northern and eastern horizons. Lake Limnia’s edge was cluttered and uncertain, with stands of reeds ten feet tall springing from the mud, their tangle of brown roots sometimes sturdy enough to walk on and blurring the boundary between land and water. Torn from the lakeside but held together by their roots, similar reeds formed floating islands that scudded slowly across the surface wherever the wind took them. Some of the islands were large and stable enough to build on, for all that there was nothing but murky water beneath them.

Jerez squatted like a festering boil on the side of the lake, a haphazard collection of little buildings made from stick, mud and reed, hundreds of them ranging from single-room shacks to sprawling two-storey excrescences that were rickety, ugly and lopsided, increasing in number towards what was nominally the centre of the town. The only stone building stood in the middle, a fort the Wasps had built for their local governor. To Achaeos’ amusement it was already listing badly as the soggy ground set about the business of reclaiming it, year by year.

Many of the locals lived out on the water itself: some of them on boats, but more on houses built on rafts. Clearly the Skaters liked to be able to move about easily and the shores of Lake Limnia comprised a maze of channels, shifting islands and floating houses. Achaeos had already heard from Gaved that the black market – the Black Guild as it was known – was strong here, since the Skaters could transport almost anything around or across the lake in secrecy. North of the lake began the wild and hilly country of the Hornet-kinden, who were the Wasps’ barbarous kindred, untamed territories that were the gateway to many fabulous places beyond.

The Skaters themselves were still very much in evidence, and Achaeos studied them anew, for Che’s benefit. Do you remember Skrill? he asked her within his mind. She was your uncle’s agent to Tark? I’d guess she must have been part-Skater.

They were a small folk, but almost grotesquely long-limbed. Every step involved a stalking, surreptitious and shifty motion. Though there were plenty of outsiders lodging in Jerez, the Skaters looked on them all with narrow-eyed suspicion, yet looked on their own kind with even more. They were blue-white of skin with long pointed ears, complementing pointed faces and pointed noses. Most of them wore drab, slightly ragged tunics that left much of the limbs bare, but some sported armour of tarnished metal scales. Almost all the adults seemed to be armed, and so far Achaeos had seen bows, slings, blowpipes, daggers, Wasp-pattern swords and even a few crossbows.

Watch them, Che. Watch how they set out. He fixed his eyes on one skinny creature that might have been female, watching closely as the Skater stepped out onto the water, then simply ran, skipping over the shallow waves, leaving nothing but a series of ripples to tell of her passage. They could all do this from an early age, for it was the Skater Art, and it was the last nail in the coffin of any Wasp attempt to control their smuggling and banditry.

But notice, he told Che in his head, how they stay close to the lake-shore, amongst the islands and the reeds. I have heard stories of great beasts, fish and insects, out towards the centre. Also they say that the lake is haunted, with strange lights appearing sometimes, deep below… Perhaps it is just talk to keep the Empire at bay, though I cannot imagine the Wasps being frightened by talk of ghosts and lights.

He stretched and yawned. He must have been living with daylight kinden for too long. The night-time, when his own people were most active, was becoming the time he felt a need for sleep. Be safe, Che, he exhorted her, across the miles that now separated them. Be safe and stay safe.

Morning brought little joy to Jerez, but a spark of it to Gaved. He looked out at the lake, now soiled by the dawn, at the stinking collection of hovels that formed the town, and he thought, I’m home.

Not true, of course. He was a drifter by nature, with no home to speak of, but business had brought him here so many times that he had almost acquired a fondness for the sorry place, second hand and with no questions asked, the way one acquired anything in Jerez. And there were even a few dwelling here that he might almost call friends, or as near to friends as his trade allowed. What’s a friend anyway? Someone to watch your back, and resist the temptation to put a knife in it.

He halted his step, still staring out at the lake, considering it. He had now seen a little of how the other half lived: Stenwold Maker and his extended clan of agents composed of all kinden; Tisamon and his daughter and their invisible bond; the joy of Stenwold’s niece when she had met again her Dragonfly comrade.

I’ll settle for the unknifed back and the freedom, he told himself.

‘You’re sure you know your business?’ The Moth’s voice came from behind him.

‘Better than anyone. My contacts here will let us in on whatever’s going on. You can’t throw this sort of thing onto the waters without causing a ripple.’

The man’s blank, suspicious eyes tried to read him but, even before receiving the burn-scar, Gaved’s face had never been particularly expressive. The Wasp gave him a nod and set off down the crooked alleys of Jerez, thinking, Trust always was hard to come by in this town.

Three streets further on he stopped a Skater child, murmuring to it as though he was merely asking directions. The skinny creature nodded, took his coin, and ran off. Gaved continued on his patient way, hands shoved into the pockets of his greatcoat. He looked as unassuming as a Wasp could get.

Two streets later and the same child returned, whispering to his ear, ‘A woman follows you: Spider-kinden, young, and very pretty.’ Gaved nodded sagely, handed over another coin, and made a change of direction as though acting on the child’s advice.

Well, no surprises. The girl reckons she can out-skulk the Skaters, but they were born for that game. It almost felt like relief, this evidence of their lack of faith in him. It added a sense of certainty to his life.

Time now to test other certainties, to see if they had rusted in the constant misting rain, for he had arrived at his destination. Of all the little shacks of Jerez this was perhaps the least prepossessing, barely more than an outhouse tacked onto the Cut Glass Export House, a Skater merchant cartel that specialized in buying in gems from the north and selling them on furtively to Consortium factors or imperial officers. Its clandestine associations with the regime were such that, even when posing under such an obvious name, it continued to operate within sight of the governor’s fort quite unchallenged.

The little outhouse was bigger on the inside than it looked, because it had bitten at least three rooms out of the neighbouring Cut Glass, with more space under negotiation the last time Gaved had been here. The Glass itself put up with them so long as prying eyes did not turn on the Export House itself.

There was a sign dangling haphazardly from the slanting roof, and Gaved saw approvingly that it had been repainted recently. The rains that came almost every other day to Jerez, that were slanting down even now, were ruthless on paint and ornament of any kind. Jerez signs eschewed words; even the advertising was underhand. The Cut Glass itself used a broken mirror, and the swaying, spinning piece of board that Gaved had sought out bore a simple eye, looking left. For those that had use for their services, it was enough.

Gaved pushed the door open and ducked inside, shaking the rain from his cloak. The first room was low-ceilinged enough to make him stoop, and empty save for the ubiquitous reed matting on the floor and a fitfully burning rush lamp hanging from the rafters.

‘Nivit!’ Gaved called out. ‘Customer!’

‘Come on in.’ A thin voice emerged from a doorway covered by just a tatty drape. The room beyond was much bigger and cluttered with half a dozen crates and a seven-foot statue of a robed Moth-kinden that Gaved recalled hauling in there, with some help, over a year ago. A lone Skater was perched on one of the crates, scratching inventories onto a slate. Nivit was bald and pallid, gaunt and hollow-cheeked even for his kind. His script was immaculate, the tiny characters crowding each other to make the most of the slate’s surface, but his writing pose was bizarre, with elbows and knees jutting out at all angles as he bent his long limbs to the task. The Skaters had clearly never been intended for literary folk.

‘Well look who it isn’t,’ Nivit crowed. ‘Himself, himself. Didn’t think I’d see you for another half-year at least.’

‘I always come back, sooner or later,’ Gaved replied.

‘Word said you pitched up in an airship. Going up in the world, is it? Or just up and down?’

‘I told them they’d not keep it a secret,’ Gaved admitted. Allanbridge had brought them down silently at night, pumped the gas out of the balloon and stowed it out of sight, the gondola abruptly transformed into a serviceable boat that they hauled through the mud of the shoreline until it was nominally afloat on the lake. Gaved had known that there was no such thing as a secret in Jerez, though. The Skaters saw everything. That was what he was counting on.

‘So tell me, chief, what’s the busy?’ Nivit put down the slate. With elaborate showiness he extracted a little bell from inside his tunic and rang it once. A moment later a young Skater, a girl as far as Gaved could tell, darted from somewhere still deeper inside the building and took the slate back with her.

‘She’s new,’ Gaved noted. ‘Business is good, I take it.’

Nivit gave a shrug, which transported his bony shoulders over a remarkable distance. ‘So I get lonely.’ Gaved knew that in a further room there rose rack after rack of shelves carrying hundreds of slates, with every transaction neatly ordered and dated. Nivit’s powers of organization were the secret of his success.

‘I’ve got a commission for us both,’ Gaved informed him.

‘So long as Nivit gets his cut, lay it on me,’ the Skater said. ‘Who’s the mark?’

‘Not who, this time, but what. Something that’s come to Jerez just recently. Something specialist and valuable, imperial contraband – or at least the Empire will be looking for it. Whoever has it will be aiming to sell it, but the price will be steep as steep.’ It felt good to be back here, working with decent, honest crooks like Nivit rather than for the Empire. Not that there was any escaping the Empire here either, of course. Most of the work the two of them had previously tackled together had involved catching imperial runaways. As well as his hunting skills, that was what Gaved had brought to the partnership: an acceptable Wasp-kinden face for their imperial patrons to deal with.

Nivit nodded. ‘Well, now, luxury goods, is it?’ He smiled slyly. ‘Already got rumours coming in of some sort of auction, see. Nothing definite as yet save that it’s really, really by invitation only, but stay with me and I’ll pry out some details for you.’

This was, for Thalric, the acid test. Like a child who had been naughty, he was at last being let out on his own. Tisamon, he realized, would be sharpening the blade of his clawed gauntlet, not so much in anticipation of betrayal but in eager longing for it. There was a man for whom the last 500 years of history might as well never have happened.

The Mantis had wanted to go with him, of course, but Thalric had patiently talked and talked, and eventually convinced the man that he, Thalric, could go places alone in a way that a Wasp could not if he were tugging a belligerent Mantis bodyguard-jailer. Since he had been brought along as their imperial expert, they now had to let him get on with his job, or dispense with him.

He had phrased it just like that, waiting for that speculative look to come to Tisamon’s face. It had been a tense moment for Thalric, knowing that his wound would slow him too much, if it was death the Mantis decided on.

Instead he had read the man, a spymaster reading an enemy agent, and seen just a touch of confusion. Stenwold was not here, to give the word and endorse Tisamon’s bloodletting. Tynisa had gone tracking the wretched mercenary, and her father’s world was a simple one of black-and-white decisions divided by a blade’s sharp edge. Now they were actually here he did not know how Thalric could be put to best use.

‘I need to go out and gather information,’ Thalric had insisted. ‘I’m no use locked up here on the Maiden.’

‘Where he’d only get in my bloody way,’ pitched in Allanbridge, who had repairs to make to the gasbag, and so became an unexpected ally.

Tisamon’s spines had twitched along his forearms, and his lips had compressed thinly, but he had eventually nodded and let Thalric go.

And so here he was off the leash again, in Jerez, back in the Empire. A Wasp in civilian clothes it was true – but then that was nothing unusual here. Jerez had so far never resisted imperial rule. There had never been a Skater army lined up against the black-and-gold. There had barely even been a local leader when the Empire first arrived, since the Skaters had seemed to choose and dispose of their headmen virtually every tenday. They had welcomed the Wasps in as the only way to contain the constant infighting and feuding that were so ubiquitous amongst them. Or that was the story, at least. Since then, Jerez had become the eternal thorn in the Emperor’s side: a conduit for fugitives and contraband that the Imperial Army could not stopper. Worse, it was a corruptor of officers, for many previously honest men had seen the opportunity in using their power and rank to dabble in the black market and make themselves handsome profits. Added to all that, this loose, mobile town shifting about on the shores of Lake Limnia produced a bare pittance of tax revenue, tax gatherers who asked too many questions tended to disappear overnight, and any proper census of the town was just impossible. More than one governor had considered trying to wipe the place off the map, but then the Skaters would just pack up their possessions and creep over the lake to somewhere else.

Scyla was obviously familiar with this place, so Thalric knew there was no point in trying to find her directly. She was not who he was looking for, anyway, since she had merely been hired to grab this box for some imperial magnate. That meant that they would be looking for her, sending hunters after her, and there were places that imperial staff tended to frequent when sent to Jerez on missions like this. It was, after all, a regular occurrence for imperial spies to end up looking for someone in this mid-den of a town. Thalric now wanted to see if whoever the Empire had sent was unimaginative enough to follow the usual path.

The answer was clear enough once he had found the two-storey shack that served as a boarding house and tavern, and was known informally as Ma Kritt’s Place. It had a veranda out front with a view of the lake, as if that would appeal to anyone, and Thalric could see three Wasp soldiers seated there at a rickety table, nursing their drinks. They too were in their civvies, but he could tell just from the way they sat that these were not only soldiers but Rekef. Someone high up was still using the poor old service to do his dirty work.

Thalric had found his ideal vantage point, leaning against the wall of a ruinous hut, with his hood up and ostensibly gazing elsewhere. He was a master of surveillance through the corner of his eye, and he had a good enough view not only to interpret gestures, but even to recognize faces.

The man he took to be their leader was called Brodan, and had been a sergeant newly called into the Rekef when last encountered, but must surely be at least a lieutenant now. Brodan had been Reiner’s man, too, if Thalric was able to judge, and a sudden surge of hope came to him.

General Maxin might certainly want him dead, but Reiner… perhaps General Reiner would decide that he was worth protecting after all. If, for example, Thalric was able to haul in some useful prisoners, fresh out of Collegium, who knew what this box was supposed to be and why it was so important.

In his time Thalric had run a few double agents, and he knew the strange balancing point that existed there: to keep a turned agent in place, the original employers had to be kept sweet, had to be convinced that the agent was still true. Hence, the traitor must still have useful information to pass on to his former masters, even as he was sending their secrets back. The situation bred a strange kind of uncertainty, for the double agent became unsure about who he was betraying to whom. Thalric had been amazed how many had still professed, despite the obvious contradiction, that they still remained loyal to their original masters.

Of course he had never said to himself, I would never do that, in their place. He had never thought that he would be in that position himself.

But here he was now, in exactly such a quandary. What did he owe Stenwold and his people? Nothing. What did he owe the Empire, though?

The same nothing, but this was not about what the Empire could do for him, but what he could do for the Empire. Seeing his countrymen over there he felt such a keening sense of loss, of exclusion, as though he was peering into a warm room through a frost-touched window, locked out in the winter cold.

A quick step over to Brodan. Good day… lieutenant, is it now? Remember me? His mouth went dry all of a sudden. He wondered if Tisamon, or his wretched daughter, was watching from somewhere. If he acted quickly enough it might not matter.

He wavered.

He fell.

He stepped out into the open, heading towards the three reclining Wasps, trying to decide whether he was some greater degree of traitor now – and, if so, to whom.