Dragonfly Falling

Twelve

Che had never before seen an Ant-kinden who was actually fat. If it were not for Plius’s distinctive Ant features she would have thought him some kind of halfbreed. That was not the only surprise about him. He was not a Sarnesh Ant, which was even more remarkable given the Ants’ propensity to make war on others of their own kind. His skin was icy blue-white while the irises of his eyes were dead black, which had the effect of making them seem huge. She had seldom seen such colouring before, and had no idea what city-state he might have come from.

‘Scuto,’ he called out from the table he had to himself in the taverna, leaning back in a capacious chair. He wore an open robe over an expensive-looking tunic that strained over his belly, but there was a shortsword slung over the chair-back, to show he had not entirely left his belligerent roots behind.

Scuto glanced about, but none of the other patrons, few enough of them, seemed interested. It was still before midday and most of the inhabitants of Sarn’s foreign quarter were out taking care of business.

‘It’s been a while,’ Plius remarked, as the Thorn Bug approached. He kicked another chair out for him, and then glanced quickly from Che’s face to Sperra’s. ‘Pimping now, are you?’ he asked. Despite his louche appearance, he spoke in an Ant’s voice, with its characteristic clipped precision.

‘This lady here is Cheerwell Maker. You remember Sten Maker? Well this is his niece. The other’s called Sperra.’

Plius waved the introductions away. ‘So I heard you were looking for me, Scuto. It’s been a while,’ he repeated.

‘It has that,’ Scuto admitted. ‘Didn’t know how much of the old cadre would still be here for me.’

Plius shrugged. ‘There’s Dola over at the Chop Ketcher Importing place but, if you’ve not heard from her, she’s probably keeping her head down. As I said, Scuto, it’s been a while since then, and we’ve all had the chance to make some money here in Sarn.’

Scuto’s pause for breath, his moment of hesitation, opened a book for Che on his relations with Plius: revealing that they had never really trusted one another, and that Scuto had no guarantee that the other man would be of any use to them.

‘So where are we now?’ Scuto asked.

Plius shrugged. ‘We’re in a city where I have a good business going, Scuto, but if you want something, then ask and, if it’s not too much out of my way, maybe it will happen.’

‘What is your business, if I can ask?’ Che put in. This man seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in Sarn.

‘Ah, well.’ Plius coughed and grinned. ‘It happens I’m the most successful milliner in Sarn.’

‘The most successful what?’ Che asked.

‘I used to be the only one, but now there are two more, which shows you how profitable the trade’s become.’

‘A milliner? You mean hats?’

Plius’s grin widened. ‘The way it was, you see, there weren’t any here, because Ants would wear helms or go bare-headed, but of course Sarn has a foreign quarter that covers almost a third of the city these days, and Sarn is half again as big as most Ant states. So there was a call for them, and business was good. And you know what? Now the Ants have started buying as well. Now they can see the foreigners having a good time, they themselves start to change how they dress and the like. They still all look like they’re ready for a funeral, but at least they’re not all dressed exactly the same.’ He turned his attention back to Scuto. ‘So what is it, then? What brings you back here for me?’

‘You know what,’ Scuto told him. ‘It’s happening, Plius. It’s time.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve heard the news.’ Plius spread his hands. ‘The Empire, which was your man Sten’s bedbug back in the old days, is away battering Tark even as we speak. Things may have changed in this city, but not that much. Nobody in Sarn’s going to lose sleep about the Tarkesh taking a few punches.’

‘We ain’t here to ask for Tark’s sake,’ Scuto said flatly. ‘It’s too late, anyway, by my reckoning. This lot’d never get there in time. Now I ain’t a diplomat or a pretty speaker, so I’ll put it plain as I can. Sure, you’ve heard about Tark. Well, soon enough you’ll hear about Helleron, too.’

‘What about Helleron?’

‘Soon enough,’ Scuto said again. ‘And probably Egel and Merro, once they’re done with Tark. Who knows where next? They’ll be marching up the coast towards Collegium, and from Helleron it’s not such a jump to take Etheryon. Or even Sarn.’

Che expected Plius to laugh this off, but something in Scuto’s tone, maybe his very lack of emphasis, had drawn the Ant’s face longer and longer. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ Plius said. ‘You’re serious?’

‘Ain’t never been more,’ Scuto confirmed, sounding tired. ‘Look, Plius, I saw the start of it at Helleron, when they tried to get a thousand men by rail into Collegium to shake the place up. They’re not really after Tark. It’s the Lowlands they want. The whole of it, from Helleron all the way to Vek and the west coast. They’ve got more fighting men than five Ant cities put together, and a dozen slave-towns to pull more soldiers from. You know the Commonweal?’

‘Yes, I know the Commonweal,’ Plius said testily.

‘Well then you know they’ve spent the last dozen years carving out a great lump of that, and now they’re ready for us,’ said Scuto. Plius’s easygoing manner had evaporated entirely now, and he was looking a little stunned.

‘So what do you want?’ he asked, and Scuto replied, ‘We need to speak to the top, Plius. To the Royal Court.’

Plius let out a long breath. ‘If you’d asked that straight off I would have said you were mad. Now, though. I have some contacts. Not high-up contacts, but they’re there. I can try for an audience, but it’ll use up just about all my credit with them.’

‘What,’ Scuto said pointedly, ‘were you saving it for?’

On their arrival, Che’s first view of Sarn had been of a city split by the line of the rail track. As the automotive pulled in to the depot it had seemed to her that somehow — by Achaeos’s magic perhaps — there were two cities, as close as a shadow to each other, but each blind to its neighbour.

To the right was Sarn, the Ant city-state comprised of low, spartan buildings, pale stone and flat roofs without decoration. The people there moved briskly but without haste, and they did not stop to speak to one another or gather to converse. Everyone knew precisely where they were going. Soldiers were on hand to watch the automotive and make sure, she suspected, that only native Sarnesh alighted through the right-hand doors. Everything looked clean and orderly and the streets of the city ran at precise angles to one another, all in the shadow of the city wall.

To the left lay the foreigners’ quarter, which presented a totally different world. To start with, its limits had begun outside the walls, with stalls, wagons and tents extending a hundred yards down the road that ran alongside the rail track. Inside the walls, it fairly bustled. Even the depot’s goods yard had suffered a hundred encroachments, with market stalls pitched ready to ambush the unwary visitor, peddlers and hawkers and dozens of kinds of traders converging or waiting or looking out for each other. There were a lot of Beetle-kinden amongst them, mostly Collegium-grown and many even College-educated: merchants and artificers and scholars all mingling, clasping hands, making animated conversation with frequent gestures, as though to compensate for the quiet world just across the track. There were others, too, especially Fly-kinden — dozens of them, from ostentatiously well-dressed merchants to grubby peddlers of trinkets, their eyes keen for a loose purse or dropped coin. There were also some from breeds not commonly found within the Lowlands: a Commonweal Dragonfly mercenary in piecemeal armour of glittering hues and a long-faced Grasshopper in College-styled robes discoursing with two Beetle scholars. Spiders, she saw, though not so many as Collegium regularly knew, and small wonder, for she had never seen so many Mantis-kinden in one place in her life. Some were in bands, lounging about and watched carefully by the guard. Many went singly, at the shoulder of some wealthy foreigner or other as a tactful and tacit warning to thieves and rivals. With their strongholds of Nethyon and Etheryon just north of Sarn, a lot of Mantis-kinden young bloods came down here looking for excitement, hiring themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.

The Sarnesh were to be found in the foreigners’ quarter as well, of course. She had expected their armoured men and women patrolling through the throng and keeping a careful eye on exposed weapons and their owners. She was struck, though, by the many brown-skinned Ant-kinden, robed or dressed in simple tunics, doing patient business with their visitors, or simply walking through the crowd, taking a vicarious interest in all the bustle that was going on within their walls.

Scuto had found them a taverna going under the sign of the Sworded Book, which suggested that its owner, past or present, had been a duellist at the Prowess Forum. Certainly it was decked out in Collegium style, with a great clock perched over the bar in imitation of the Forum itself. Now Che sat at a window and watched the foreign-quarter marketplace, a bizarre halfbreed venue that seemed wrenchingly close to home and yet completely distant. Meanwhile, only three streets away, the Sarnesh proper continued to hold their normal silent communion with one another.

‘I’ve never really visited an Ant city before,’ she admitted. ‘It’s not at all what I expected.’

Sperra, virtually sitting in her shadow, snorted. ‘This isn’t just any Ant city. Sarn’s different. I’ve been in Tark and Kes before and it wasn’t fun.’

‘But they have their foreign quarters too,’ Che recalled from her studies.

‘They do, only there’re guards watching every wretched thing you do, waiting for you to take a step out of line, and nobody talks any more than they have to, so’s to be like the locals. And if you’re Fly-kinden like me, you’re on double guard, because if something goes wrong and they don’t know who did it, they just hang the first person they don’t like, and they always assume it’s us. And, ah! The slaves. There are slaves everywhere, and what their masters overlook, the slaves’ll spot. And you just know they’ll tell their owners, because the Ants don’t have any use for slack slaves.’

Che grimaced. However bad Ant-kinden masters might be, a severity surely bred of frugality and efficiency, she had herself become a slave to the Empire, and she was willing to wager that was worse. ‘Your kinden don’t keep slaves — do you?’ she enquired. The Fly-kinden fielded no armies, nor had any great repute as artificers, scholars or social reformers. They tended to slip off the edge of the College curriculum.

‘Oh they’d tell you that in Egel or Merro,’ Sperra said disdainfully. ‘But don’t you believe them. It’s all about the money — families owing other families. And if your family can’t settle what’s due, they’ll sell you. Indenture, it’s called, only basically it’s slavery.’

‘Was that what happened to you?’

‘Would have done,’ the Fly replied, ‘only I was smart enough to skip out. Everyone thinks it’s so homey to be one of my kinden: all family and sticking together and everyone mucking in, all rosy cheeks and cheeky banter. If it’s so wonderful, why do you think so many of us are living anywhere but home?’

The two of them silently watched the ebb and flow of Sarnesh business for a little while, until Sperra added, ‘But here, I could like it here. No slaves here in Sarn, and out-landers seem to get a fair deal.’

‘If you’d come here three generations back, it would have been just like Tark and Kes,’ Che observed, and instantly saw that Sperra did not know what she meant. ‘It’s all down to a man called Jons Pathawl. A reformer.’

‘Never heard of him,’ Sperra said. ‘What did he do?’

‘He came to Sarn from the College and started preaching about freedom and equality and all that.’

The Fly stared at her. ‘You’re telling me that one man just talking did all this? And they didn’t lock him up or anything?’

‘Actually they did lock him up, and he was going to be hanged as a warning to other outspoken scholars. He had a band of followers, though, and they made a bid to free him. In the process they got in the way of Vekken assassins come to wipe out the whole Royal Court prior to one of their wars. So, as a mark of thanks, the Queen and her court agreed to listen to what Pathawl had to say. That was what changed everything. He must have been a very persuasive speaker. Still, look at Sarn now. There’s more money here than in any of the other city-states, and instead of a force of slaves who are a liability as soon as things get hot, you’ve got a resident population of experts and advisers who will fight to defend what they view now as their home. Plus, Sarn gets all the best of the Collegium scholars after Helleron’s had its pick.’

Achaeos slipped into the taverna at that point, sitting down at their table with a quick glance towards the door.

‘I have made contact,’ he began.

‘With the — the Arcanum?’

He nodded, his expression suggesting that it was a name best not spoken openly. ‘We can speak to them. I have a name now. A place to go.’

‘You want me to come?’

‘I have thought about it. To them I will be only an intermediary. A Moth bringing the word of Collegium will seem wrong, to them. It is best that you speak for Stenwold.’

The ‘place to go’ turned out to be a tall-roofed house almost beside the wall of the city, just where the foreign quarter met the river. Sarn had no inferior districts as such, and Che understood the appeal to foreigners of doing business where the Ant militia was always tough on robbery and double-dealing. Even so, the place that Achaeos had found stood in the murkiest district that the city had to offer.

There was no sign, no indication of the building’s use, but they went along at dusk when the street was nearly deserted, a pair of Ant soldiers on patrol just turning off at the far end.

‘Is there going to be trouble here?’ Che asked him cautiously.

‘It’s possible,’ he admitted. ‘I have not been told so outright, but I believe that the Sarnesh are inclined to turn a blinder eye here than they do elsewhere in the city. I suspect their rulers benefit somehow — perhaps their own spies can deal here for information, or goods not sold openly. This place is a gambling house, also a brothel, where the rougher kind of foreigner comes to deal and talk. I’d guess every so often the Sarnesh raid it, and no doubt the owners arrange in advance who gets caught and who is given warning to flee. A dangerous line to walk.’

She nodded. ‘I hate to remind you, but we’re not exactly the rougher kind of foreigner.’

He gave her a smile that was almost rakish. ‘Try me,’ he suggested.

Inside the place was dark. There were two half-shuttered lanterns hanging low on the walls but, if she had not had the Art to see through the gloom, she would have tripped over every projecting foot and every chair. As it was, although Achaeos slipped between the tables deftly, she had to push her way through the narrow gaps. The occasional patron gave her a baleful look, but she realized that it was those who minded their own business and did not look up who were likely to be the more dangerous.

The clientele were a ragged pack. She saw plenty of Fly-kinden, who always seemed to throng these kinds of places. There were a couple of Spiders, too, and several Mantis-kinden who looked perennially ready for a fight. There was even a Mantis warrior in attendance on a sly-eyed Spider lady, a partnership which stretched Che’s imagination, and two robed Moth-kinden, who watched them pass with blank white eyes while sharing a sweet-smelling pipe between them.

There was no bar as such; instead a Beetle-kinden sat at a small table by the rear door and sent a young Fly girl back for beer when it was requested. Achaeos went up to him and exchanged a few words before palming a gold Central to him, whereupon the man nodded to one of the occupied tables.

It was a gaming table, five-handed, with cards being snatched, turned and discarded almost faster than Che could follow. There was something nearly Ant-kinden about it, for none of the players spoke, each just following the course of the game by mutual consensus. There was no room to stand back a step, so she ended up right at the shoulder of one of the gamblers. He was holding his cards at such an acute angle that she wondered how even he could read them.

One of the players was a Mantis, who also seemed to be the dealer. Her hard face, with its pointed chin and ears, should have been attractive, except it was frozen with the cold disdain of her race, which made her seem only hostile and bleak. As her hands made automatic motions with the cards she glanced up at Achaeos and nodded briefly.

‘Last hand, last hand,’ she said, ‘then break for drinks and begin again.’

They ante’d up, and Che noticed the stock lying in the middle of the table was partly coins and partly rings, brooches and other small items of jewellery that had probably recently changed ownership. There was a flurry of cards, back and forth with increasing urgency, and the hand fell to a copper-skinned little man seated to the Mantis’s left, someone resembling a Fly-kinden but not quite. When he had scooped up his winnings, three of the gamblers rose and took their leave, with curious glances at Che, leaving only the Mantis and the diminutive man with the winning streak.

‘Sit,’ the woman instructed. ‘Master Moth, you’ve been spotted, and you’ve been asking some questions. I’ll have your name.’

‘Achaeos, Seer of Tharn,’ he replied easily, taking the seat across from her.

‘Who’s your doxie,’ the small man asked. ‘Are you selling or renting her?’

‘My patroness,’ Achaeos said pointedly, ‘is Cheerwell Maker of the Great College.’

The little man snorted, but the Mantis nodded thoughtfully. ‘An interesting pairing, Master Achaeos. My own name is Scelae. This creature is Gaff. You understand that those whom we serve have greater emissaries than we. We are merely convenient to greet new arrivals.’

Achaeos nodded, as Gaff produced a pipe from within his leather jerkin and lit it — Che blinked in surprise — by a flicker of flame issuing from his thumb. Some Ancestor Art of his kinden, she realized, whichever kinden that was.

‘She’s your patroness, let her talk,’ said Scelae, leaning back in her chair.

Che looked to Achaeos for support but he remained without expression, waiting for her to speak. She swallowed uncomfortably. ‘You. You and your masters have heard of the Wasp-kinden, of course,’ she began.

Eyes hooded, Scelae nodded. The little man stopped puffing on his pipe for a moment and then started again.

‘Your business is information, I’m sure,’ Che continued, hearing her voice tremble with nerves, ‘so you’ve heard the news from Tark.’

‘And from further,’ Gaff agreed. He glanced from Scelae to Che. ‘If Tark’s your high card, lady, then I’ll raise you.’

‘Quiet,’ Scelae told him. ‘Assume we are aware of the Wasp-kinden, their armies and their Empire, and assume, as you say, that information is our business. What would you say to our masters?’

Che screwed up her courage, trying to present the words as Stenwold would have done. ‘That old divisions must be put aside,’ she said. ‘We need your help, and you need ours.’

‘Who is “we”?’

She was about to say her uncle’s name, which would surely mean less than nothing, and then Collegium, but what should that matter to the Moths of Dorax living so many miles away?

‘The Lowlands,’ Che said at last.

Scelae looked at Gaff, and the little man shrugged.

‘Nobody tells me anything,’ he said, ‘but I hear on the wind that the big men in Tharn have done a whole lot of considering of their position recently. But then I hear all sorts, and most of it’s rubbish,’ he added conversationally to Achaeos.

‘Where are you staying?’ Scelae asked Che.

‘I-’ Che stopped, torn. The Mantis smiled sharply.

‘You are asking us to trust you. In return, you will have to trust us. We reserve the right, Cheerwell Maker, to take what action we will. If that means that we are told to aid you, then you will receive our aid. If instead that means that a Beetle-child who should not even be aware of our name disappears from Sarn then that also shall happen, and in which case do you really think we could not find you?’

‘I’m at the sign of the Sworded Book,’ Che said. ‘But I tell you that not because of threats, but because you’re right: somebody has to make the first move, with trust. I trust Achaeos to have brought me to the. ’ Just in time she swallowed the name ‘Arcanum’, ‘to the right people. And I trust the right people to consider seriously that the Lowlands is no longer in the same position as this time last year. And whether you’re in a College by the coast or in a city up a mountain, that’s just as true.’

The other gamblers were returning now, and Gaff began shuffling the cards.

‘We will speak with our masters,’ Scelae told her. ‘No more than that.’