Empire in Black and Gold

Nine

‘Get to the ballista! Salma! Tynisa! Someone get to the ballista!’ Che yelled, and realized that neither of them would know what to do with it. Totho was now clambering, exhausted, up onto the flier’s stern and so she shouted it at him instead. He gave her an aggrieved look but struggled over to the weapon.

A burst of energy impacted squarely on one wing, punching a hole through the light wood frame. The fixed-wing bucked dangerously and Che had to turn her attention back to keeping the craft level.

Behind her, Totho reached the ballista. It was nothing more than a glorified heavy crossbow, but double-strung with two sets of arms to give the single bolt more range and force. There was a two-handled winch at the butt end and he cranked it over and over to drag the string back against the resistance of the sprung steel.

‘Pass me a bolt!’ he called over his shoulder. For a moment he thought that they would prove incapable even of that. He began to curse all Inapt peoples, but then Tynisa nearly rammed a quarrel in his ear as the flier pitched and he snatched it from her and slotted it into place.

The first Wasp soldier appeared, darting past the fixed-wing on its far side. There was energy dancing about his hands, something that Totho could recognize as Ancestor Art, but of some Wasp variation he had never previously encountered. The man sent a bolt of energy straight at Che, who flinched, pulling the fixed-wing into a long curving turn back towards the lagging Wasp soldiers.

‘Get him away! Someone get him away from me!’ Che shrieked. Totho tried to swivel the ballista about, but its angle of fire would not permit it. Instead he wrenched it back to face the other Wasps, two of them now almost on him, and one flew straight into the weapon’s path without spotting it. Totho glimpsed a second’s worth of abject horror as the man suddenly realized, then he released the trigger and the bolt rammed into its target at no more than ten yards’ distance. The very force of impact hurled him away, end over end over end, somersaulting towards the earth. Totho hurriedly began winching the ballista’s arms back again.

Another crackle of energy struck the side of the hull, just beyond the pilot’s seat, and the entire flier rocked as Che ducked. There was nowhere to hide, though, nowhere to dodge. ‘Hammer and tongs, someone do something!’ she shouted, looking angrily back at the others.

Salma was standing up even as she looked, and a moment later he parted company with the fixed-wing, and his own wings unfurled into being. He launched into the air in a blaze of silver. His sword was already out, a wicked short punch-blade that thrust straight out from the knuckles, and he kept pace with the limping flier effortlessly, dancing in the air before diving beneath it. Che caught her breath. She remembered him saying that the Wasp-kinden were clumsy in the air but this had not been true until he took flight. She spotted him again a moment later, soaring up under the Wasp who was targeting her. The man had little enough chance to notice him before Salma had slashed across him, and in his wake the Wasp was left clutching a bloody wound in his side, tumbling over himself and falling out of the sky.

Salma paused, treading air while flying backwards as he kept up speed, and then he flung himself along the entire length of the fixed-wing, cutting a curve around its doubled wings and lunging at the closest Wasp with blade outstretched.

Che peered straight ahead and blanked her mind of anything now but flying the machine to safety. She forced herself to keep the flier level and would worry about Salma later. Still, that sight of Salma, vaunting in the air with his sword gleaming in the sunlight, was something that would not readily leave her.

Salma toyed with the other Wasp, darting in and out, hovering where the soldier could only lumber after him through the air. Then the Dragonfly was gone and past him. As the Wasp turned, spitting a bolt of sting-energy at his taunter, Totho shot the man in the back with enough force to slam the steel head of the bolt right through his chest.

There were three further specks in the sky out there, insignificant now beside the receding bulk of the Sky Without. For a moment Salma wanted to go after them too, to dance amongst them in the sky and to take them if he could. His ancestors and his fallen kin were calling for him to do so, urging him to test himself.

But he was not a man alone. He had others he was responsible for. Stenwold had known, when he gave them this task, that Salma was no callow youth but had experience enough not to indulge himself.

Fast though he was, he had to push himself to catch up with the fixed-wing, and that meant the Wasp pursuers would never overtake it. He caught hold of a wing, pulled himself forward into the arms of Tynisa and Totho as he released his Art and his wings flickered and vanished from his back. He discovered that he was panting heavily after the brief flight, shamefully out of practice. Tynisa was giving him a wondering look. Totho’s expression was just relief that it was all over.

‘Which way to Helleron?’ he called. ‘Can we get there in this thing?’

Che glanced back and grinned at him. ‘I’ve taken a compass reading already,’ she said. ‘If we’ve got enough fuel we’ll make it. Otherwise it might mean a bit of a walk.’

She brought the fixed-wing down still some distance from Helleron because, from the noise the engine was making, it would not have been able to carry them much further. Landing was, she now discovered, distinctly the trickiest part of the flight. Or at least the flier itself did not enjoy it. When it finally ground to a halt while traversing the furrows of some farmer’s field, it had lost half a wing and the stabilizers from the front.

On solid ground at last, Che took a deep breath. That had been a harrowing experience, white knuckles clamped on the sticks, staring into the blue while trying to coax as much distance out of the craft as it could give her. She was glad to be travelling on nothing more challenging than her own two feet once again. Still. . in a strange way she had enjoyed it. Beetles might possess the grace of stone blocks when the Art allowed them wings, but their artifice could make up for that sometimes.

‘Everybody in one piece?’ she called back, to a chorus of grumbles as her passengers began to extricate themselves from the mortally wounded flier.

The wronged farmer, whom they encountered shortly thereafter, told them that they were still about a day’s journey from Helleron, further away than they had hoped. He was not the coarse-handed rustic that they had been expecting. This close to Helleron even the sons of the soil saw a great deal of the Lowlands culture passing by. They offered him the salvage rights to the fixed wing and Tynisa haggled languidly with him until they had secured transport to the nearest thoroughfare, as well as a few provisions and clothes. The latter, she explained, would be important since the Sky Without would doubtless be at berth at Helleron’s airfield by the time they reached the city, and the Wasps would be out in force looking for them. Disguise would therefore be crucial, as they waited for Bolwyn at Benevolence Square.

‘Why do we think the Wasps are all over Helleron, then?’ Che asked.

‘Their agents will be,’ Tynisa said confidently. ‘The Wasps have had a good while now to put them in place. We need to find Bolwyn as quickly as possible, and then step well out of sight.’

Helleron crept up over the horizon like a looming black tide. The road they were following was a jostling two-way stream of travellers feeding the city’s eternal hunger for buying and selling. There were hand-carts and travelling tinkers laden with their packs; there were wagons drawn by horses or by great insects, mostly slow and patient beetles that could muscle along all day if need be. A few mounted wayfarers passed by too, either horse-borne or on bug-back. Much of the traffic was mechanical though, they noted, for Helleron was the centre of the artificing world, and its wandering children would return there in droves.

They watched the city come near from their perch on the hood of a great grain-hauling automotive trundling along on six metal legs — looking more like a beetle than those insects themselves. None of them had fully appreciated the concept of Helleron as the Lowlands’ epicentre of industry. They had envisaged something like Collegium but with a few more factories and without the elegant white buildings of the College.

But Helleron was vast, extending half again Collegium’s size, the greatest single city in all the Lowlands. It sprawled and it was dirty: whether its buildings had been raised of dark stone or not, they had been overlaid, day after day, with the grime of the city’s foundries and workshops. There was a pall in the very air, as though the visitors were gazing on the place through smoked glass. A hundred hundred chimneys gouted it out continually, their narrow windows aglare with forge-fire.

It was built on two scales, the city. The factories were huge grubs, extended and extended, comprising mazes of workrooms, storerooms and vehicle yards. Up on the western hills, where the air was clearer, there were mansions built as grandiose statements in stone, telling about their owners’ profits and losses. Between these hulks, however, swarmed the masses. The buildings that housed the workers of Helleron were crammed together, squeezed tight, beside and under and over, as though jostling for position beside the mighty flanks of their masters. The whole complexity was shot through with silver: the rails that were Helleron’s breath and blood, shuttling men and machines, crew and commodities, across the breadth of the city, north to the mines or south part-way to the Ant city of Tark. It seemed at first glance that the rails’ silver lacework was the only passage through the city. The walls of the buildings seemed so crammed together that surely not even the smallest insect could have crept between them.

They watched the sheer enormity of it grow and approach them across the distance. Even Totho, that champion of industry, was humbled.

‘Are we even going to be able to find this Benevolence Square?’ he asked.

‘Uncle Sten said it was near the airfield — which is over there.’ Across a cleared area of land the pale blister of the Sky Without was clearly visible. Che shaded her eyes, thinking for a moment that she might be able to discern some details, some dabs of black and gold, but she had forgotten the Sky’s great bulk. It was still further away than she realized.

Closer still, and they at last saw that there was indeed breathing space, even open space, in Helleron, but none of it had been left alone. There were squares, but they were roofed by the canvas of countless traders’ stalls, or else thronging with swarms of citizens. There were alleys and roads, but half of them were concealed under overarching buildings, the opposite sides of streets leaning in to turn a thoroughfare into a tunnel for the sake of a few extra square yards of living space in their upper storey. And where there were gaps between the buildings, these gaps were filled with people.

‘No outer walls,’ Salma said quietly. They turned to look at him in puzzlement and he gestured. It was plain to see, when you looked out for it. Helleron’s very commerce apparently made it proof against invasion — or so went the theory writ large in its streets. Helleron free was of greater use to all the rest of the world than Helleron chained would be to anyone.

Tynisa recalled the ill-fated Captain Halrad’s manner, his possessive attitude. If all Wasps thought that way then they would seek to pluck Helleron and hold it close, crush it in their grasping hands until it was good for nothing and nobody. The Wasp Empire, by Halrad’s own words, was no respecter of mutual benefit. The Wasp Empire saw only property to be possessed and enemies to vanquish.

The four of them had dressed themselves up as local peasantry, and Salma and Tynisa had hoods up to shade their faces. If the mysterious Thalric was waiting for them in Helleron, as seemed almost certain, then they were determined to make it harder for him. The city’s daunting size would become their unexpected ally.

Helleron finally fell across them like a shadow. The buildings rose abruptly high on both sides, the air thickening with smoke and the stench of people. Here on the outskirts were those seeking to mimic the commerce of the inner city: little amateur markets selling goods of dubious provenance for small change, itinerant entertainers and charlatans, beggars everywhere. A squad of Ant soldiers drilled in an open space before the city, their masters or employers no doubt tending their business within. Stake-fenced pens advertised the wares of slavers: even though Beetles kept no slaves and allowed none within their towns, more lives were bought and sold in Helleron every day than anywhere else in the Lowlands.

‘Where do you stop?’ Che inquired of the driver of their automotive. He was sitting one level down from them, exposed to the open air just like any real beetle driver.

‘Chancery Street Station,’ he rasped back. ‘Got a big depot there, they have.’

‘Excuse me, but do you happen to know Benevolence Square?’ she continued. It seemed the easiest way, although she was sure an experienced agent would have had a more subtle way of doing it.

He did indeed, and although the way was long, they had only to follow one of the outer circula, as he called Helleron’s ringroads, in order to come to it.

‘You can’t miss it,’ their driver assured them. ‘The old Benevolence place has got two great big skeletons all over it.’

That sounded unlikely, but they disembarked as instructed, having no directions to trust save his. The tide of busy humanity that was Helleron immediately engulfed them, and in the first moments Che was nearly ripped away from her companions and hauled off down the street by the simple crush of people, each one a slave to his destination. The four of them huddled together, feeling cowed by such a press. Great vehicles, beasts and wagons crawled past them to one side, the walls leered down to the other. A succession of short-tempered people buffeted them as they stood in the way, a stone in the course of the human stream.

Tynisa signalled that they should move on, and they found their way into the flow, bustled along at an undignified pace. The people around them seemed mostly workers and small traders. They looked close mouthed and sullen, minding their own business and never looking at each other. Passing on, the wall to one side gave way to a succession of small workshops: a cobbler, a piece-maker, a sharpener, a leatherworker, men and women hard at work with solid, uncomplaining, joyless faces.

Salma’s face, too, was wrinkled up. ‘I can’t understand how they live with the smell of themselves,’ he complained. ‘The smell of the air. . it’s like it’s been burned and then sweated out.’

‘Let me guess, they don’t have. . factories or anything like that, where you come from,’ Totho said.

‘And how thankful I am for it,’ said Salma. ‘We may have our vices but this mayhem isn’t one of them. I don’t even know if there’s a name for what vice this is.’

‘Helleron,’ Tynisa suggested. ‘There’s your name.’

Totho shrugged, as best he could in the crush. ‘Well, I think it’s. . it’s got promise. I’d like to work here. Everything ever manufactured is made here. What do you think, Che?’

She felt rather guilty in the face of his enthusiasm, but she replied, ‘Collegium for me, every time.’

‘And that must be the Benevolence,’ Salma said suddenly. Ahead of them, past a line of near-identical inns and stables, lay a square. The largest building fronting it was facing them as well. The driver had been wrong, however: there was only one skeleton patterned in pale bricks amongst the darker stone. The other figure depicted a woman, austerely offering her hand to the same cadaver. The ‘old Benevolence place’ had been an almshouse once, offering succour to the needy, the destitute, the sick and the mad. Now it was a workhouse, where any succour was bought with a hard day’s labour. There was little enough going free in Helleron.

Salma struck without warning, his fingers pincering the wrist of a boy even as the child was putting a hand into his pocket. There was a fraught moment, for the child produced a blade, and then Che saw it was not even a child, but a Fly-kinden adult got up in child’s clothing. A long look passed between Salma and the wretch, and then the Dragonfly let him go, and the man was immediately lost in the crowd.

‘You should have called the watch,’ Che said.

Salma gave her a bleak look. ‘Just having to live here seems punishment enough.’

‘There are an awful lot of people here,’ sighed Tynisa. ‘How are we going to find this Bolwyn individual?’

‘We’ve missed him,’ Salma said. ‘He’d be expecting us off the Sky Without which must have got in. . Totho?’

‘Yesterday,’ Totho guessed.

‘We have to hope that he’ll come here again to look for us. So let’s get up on the steps of the big place over there, and watch for him. And if he doesn’t come today, what’s left of it, we’ll try it again tomorrow. If that doesn’t work then we’ll make other plans. What other plans, though, I don’t know.’

‘I’ve got some relatives in Helleron,’ Che suggested. ‘I can probably remember their name, given a minute. Someone must know where they live.’

‘It’s a fallback, possibly,’ Salma confirmed. ‘Now, eyes on the crowd, and try not to look suspicious.’

There was no Bolwyn that day, or if he was there at all, they missed him. They ate unpalatable food from even less palatable vendors, and when the smoggy gloom deepened into night they sought refuge at one of the inns, only to find its prices unheard of, so that their communal wealth would barely buy them enough space on the common-room floor. Che then remembered that they had passed a Keepers’ wayhouse coming in, and they tangled back through the gaslit streets trying to find it. They were not the only ones abroad after sundown, for at first they encountered guardsmen with oil-burning lamps and crossbows, but only in those areas where the residents had wealth worth protecting. The other nocturnal pedestrians were involved in darker trades, either practising them or seeking to buy. The four soon had plenty of offers in their short journey, from the pleasures of the flesh to drugs and potions to small valuables whose current owners were anxious to part with them.

The wayhouse, found at last, promised no better accommodation than any of the inns, but it was to be had for the price of a reasonable donation, and they could rest easy there without the fear of getting their throats cut. The Keepers were a charitable order, originally from Collegium, which had spread throughout the Lowlands as part of the great upswell of humanist philosophy a century ago, when good deeds had been fashionable, and the wealthy competed in funding public works. The benevolent way of life still endured in Collegium, but apart from the grey-robed Keepers there was little enough of it to be seen in Helleron.

The next day, halfway to noon, Salma spotted their man.

They had been taking it in turns to stand up and stare, the others meanwhile sitting on the steps of the Benevolence, as many did. No beggars there, though. From time to time a pair of Ants with clubs dangling at their belts came out from inside, and anyone who could not show them at least a coin or two was thrown off roughly. The Benevolence provided only one form of charity for the poor, which was earned with hard graft.

Salma nudged Che with the toe of his sandal, startling her out of a light doze. When she stood up, as they all did, he murmured, ‘Far end, on the right corner. What do you think?’

Che saw only a bustle of people there and it seemed impossible that Salma could have recognized any face at that distance.

‘Give me the picture,’ the Dragonfly demanded. He glanced quickly from the sketch to the crowd. ‘It’s him, I’m sure of it. Look, he’s coming this way.’

It took the others longer to pick him out from the crowds, even with Salma muttering constant directions. Then the face leapt out of the mob at them. A man with a heavy, unshaven jaw, hair already receding a little from the time that picture was drawn. He wore the open, sleeveless robe that seemed to be the fashion for artisans and middle merchants here, but the under-robe below it was supplemented with a buckled leather cuirass. A man undoubtedly expecting trouble, and this impression inspired a kind of trust.

‘We have to approach him. He won’t know us,’ Che said.

‘Allow me,’ Tynisa said, and sauntered casually down the steps of the Benevolence. They tracked her progress through the crowd, moving with no obvious direction or urgency, until she was within arm’s reach of Bolwyn. He twitched as she passed, turned to look, and they guessed she must have snagged his sleeve. She spoke to him, simply an apology rendered, then apparently interest expressed by a male Beetle of middling years towards an attractive young woman of another kind. Interest repaid, as she smiled at him, and a moment later the pair were walking away together, making for one of the roads leading out of Benevolence Square.

‘Off we go,’ Salma said, and the other three descended into the crowd, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible as they intercepted Tynisa and her newfound friend.

Once out of sight of the square, the two of them ducked under the awning of a clothier’s shop and mulled over fabrics until the stragglers caught up. Bolwyn glanced around guardedly. He had a long knife sheathed at his belt, and one hand constantly plucked at the robe over it.

‘Where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘Why weren’t you on the Sky?’

‘Due to mutual friends who wanted more of our company,’ Tynisa told him. He grunted.

‘So you’re Stenwold’s new people,’ he remarked. ‘He said to expect a Commonwealer and I’m not sure I believed him. Nice of him to pick his people so they’re just about as conspicuous as possible.’

Salma looked at him levelly. ‘I can’t believe you saw through my disguise. Besides, I’ve seen a half-dozen of my kinden so far in Helleron. We get everywhere, apparently.’

Bolwyn shrugged. ‘So, you know me but I’m not sure I need to know you, yet. We’ll let the chief decide on that. When’s the Old Man himself expected?’

‘We don’t know,’ Che admitted. ‘He said he’d meet us here as soon as he could, but there were. . problems back home.’

‘Even in Collegium now? Well, how the world turns,’ Bolwyn said, scratching his stubble. ‘Let’s get you off the streets as soon as, shall we? Come with me and just try to keep up.’

He looked each way down the street before hurrying out into the crowd, obviously used to Helleron’s human press. For them, however, it took a fair deal of shouldering and elbowing to keep pace with him.

‘Friendly sort, isn’t he?’ Che muttered.

‘I don’t think this business of ours breeds friends,’ Tynisa told her.

Bolwyn got them off the street fairly quickly, heading down a narrow alley that was backed onto on either side by a row of small shops. Nobody else had much reason to go there, and only very few were out to watch them pass: an old Beetle sitting at a window, smoking a clay pipe cupped in his hands; a limping Fly in old rags scavenging through newer rags. There was a sour, rotting smell here over and above Helleron’s customary reek.

Their guide kept glancing back at them, stopping and then starting again. Che thought that he could not look more suspicious if he tried, but then she was beginning to think that her breed was definitely not made for espionage. That led her to wonder just what her uncle had ever experienced that had led him into the trade. Or Bolwyn either, for that matter. What course had ended up in him turning down this alley on this day, with four amateurs in tow?

‘Wait up, Bolwyn,’ Salma snapped. ‘Who’s that up ahead?’

Che had not even noticed anyone, but she was beginning to realize that Salma’s eyes were far keener than her own. Ahead, she saw, were a handful of figures, muffled in cloaks.

‘Don’t you worry about them,’ Bolwyn’s voice came back to them. ‘They’re mine, to make sure nobody comes after us.’

They hurried towards the waiting men, who looked tough and mean: an Ant, a Beetle and some kind of halfbreed. Their eyes, passing across Bolwyn’s four young followers, remained devoid of emotion.

Is this the sort of person I’ll be dealing with, from now on? Che wondered. She was beginning to feel homesick for Collegium, where unpleasant things, when they happened, were at least the exception.

Salma almost punched her in the mouth, and she had a second of utter confused hurt before she realized he had merely flung out an arm to halt her.

‘Run!’ he shouted, and she had a sudden sense of motion. She lost vital seconds trying to understand whilst the others were already reacting. Tynisa, her rapier clear of its scabbard, was skittering back down the alleyway. Totho had already turned, running off back the way they had come and trusting that the others were following him. His artificer’s bag jostled and bounced awkwardly on his back.

There were men now coming at them from a side alley, and as the first one’s cloak twitched aside she caught a flash of black and gold.

‘Bolwyn!’ she cried, seeing even as she did that his three men were starting to move forward. They were not coming to her rescue, though. They were coming to join in the ambush.

Bolwyn turned, and for a moment his face was just an expressionless mask, without any life or feeling. . and it seemed to blur even as she looked, a smearing of the features in some way that knotted her insides with horror. Then the Beetle’s face was as before, but she still felt that something else was watching her through those mild eyes.

‘Run!’ Salma yelled to her again. He had his punch-sword now in hand, lunging forward as the first Wasp soldier cleared the alley’s mouth. The man deflected the thrust but Salma pushed close, whipping his elbow up to crack into his opponent’s jaw.

Che stumbled back, hands still groping for her own blade.

‘Run!’ Salma bellowed once more, and she ran.