Empire in Black and Gold

Ten

Tynisa pelted down the alleyway, seeing the street at the far end, with all its life and its busy throng. There was a figure appearing in the way, though, then two of them: nondescript men who could have simply been out-of-work labourers, save for the shortswords they were now drawing from within their jerkins. She saw Totho, ahead of them, skid to a halt, about to turn and help.

‘Go!’ she shouted at him. ‘Go! I can take them!’ And he went, and she was running full pelt with her rapier extended, and there were still only two of them.

They were not skilled. Even as she was almost on them something in her read them, the way they stood, the way they held their swords. These were cheap hoods, and she was better than that.

She feigned left, went right at the very last moment. The man to her right had gone along with her first indication. Now he was in the way of his fellow. She buried the rapier in him, through the leather of his jerkin, his shirt, under his ribs. She held firm to the hilt and ran on, letting the force of her charge drag him around by the wound, letting it pull her around to face him, and slide the blood-slick rapier clean of him even as he fell. He got in the way of his fellow even then, the wretched man helplessly stumbling over the convulsing body. She could see herself as though she was watching an actor in some awful, mock-tragic opera. She watched as she put the blade effortlessly into the back of the man’s neck as he tripped past her, ramming it home with brutal efficiency and then whipping it out again.

She felt a keen and terrible sense of her own prowess, some possessing force that guided her hand, that hissed triumph in her ear. Her face, unknown to her, was smiling.

Totho was gone and she looked back for the others. Instead she spotted two Wasp soldiers coming for her. Their swords were sheathed but they had open hands outstretched to unleash the fire of their Art. She heard Salma shouting for her to run.

She skipped backwards into the crowded street. The people eddied about her, some staring at her reddened sword, some into the alley at what she had done with it. There were now screams, shouting. She watched the Wasps coming.

Then there were more than Wasps coming. From further down the street a half-dozen guardsmen were pushing. They had shields, armour. She cast a desperate look back down the alley. There was a lot going on there, and she could not see how her friends were faring.

The guard were almost here and she decided that she had no wish to answer questions. She would find somewhere to hole up, come back as soon as things allowed. Without putting her blade away, she ran for cover.

Che had her sword out and, when the Wasp grabbed her other wrist, the decision to slash at him was taken entirely on reflex, following her training at the Prowess Forum. The Wasp flinched back from it but she still laid open the back of his hand. Somewhere behind her Salma was fighting, steel ringing on steel amid the curses of his opponents.

The Wasp reached for her again, sword up now to deflect her own. She retreated from him, knees bent and stance textbook-perfect. ‘Salma!’ she called.

‘Run!’ she heard him urge her once again.

‘Can’t!’ She watched the Wasp as she spoke and knew, before he moved, that he would take advantage of the word. He came in, weapon high but still trying to grab her with his wounded hand. Her blade darted forwards at his chest, and then under his parry, sliding along his side. It cut only armour, though, scoring along the metal beneath his cloak. He snagged the collar of her tunic and she brought the pommel of her blade down across the raw wound on his hand.

He snarled and his control snapped. He hit her clumsily across the face, which must have hurt him more than her, and then he was no longer trying to catch her, but to kill her.

His sword stabbed forward and she rolled with it, sensing the blade pass her by. The hilt jarred into her shoulder. He was too close for her to stab, but she punched him in the side of the head with her own hilt as hard as she could. He reeled half into her, and she cast him past her, slashing him across the back. Again her sword rang on armour, but the force of the blow sent him to the ground.

‘Onto the roof! Che!’ She heard Salma’s voice, but from overhead now. He was hovering above her holding out a hand.

Part of her was already saying I’ll never make it, but there was a new part, a part that was fighting for her life and was not about to give up now. She took a great run at the nearest shop-back. There was a barrel there that she sprang onto, feeling it topple and give way even as she did so, but she was jumping again, in a great ungainly extended stumble. She caught a window ledge with her other foot and pushed off into space. And there was nowhere else for her to go.

Salma caught her outstretched hand and heaved. He could not have lifted her from the ground, but she was already in motion, and he threw all the force his wings could muster into pulling her onto the roof.

She shrieked as her arm nearly came out of its socket, but a moment later they were up there, all of two storeys up, and he was still pulling, forcing her to run.

There was a Wasp coming after them, the one she had wounded. He was fighting mad, his wings a blur, and she and Salma had nowhere to go but over other exposed roofs.

‘What now?’ she demanded — and he shoved her off.

She fell onto a shop awning on the other side of the roof, and ripped through it immediately, landing with enough force to knock the breath out of her.

The shopkeeper, a Fly-kinden, was glaring down at her angrily. ‘Beetle-kinden!’ he spat. ‘You’re never going to learn that you just don’t belong up there!’

She got to her feet, looking up, watching out for the Wasps. There were none to be seen yet. She looked along the street: there was no sign of Tynisa, or Totho either.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she whirled round, her sword up ready. Salma caught her wrist in time, and for a moment they just stared at each other.

She let her breath out from under bruised ribs. ‘The soldier. .?’

‘No more.’ She was pleased to see that even he, even Salma, seemed shaken by the episode. ‘Come on. We have to find the others before the enemy does.’

As soon as he reached the next alley mouth Totho turned, expecting to see Tynisa coming after him. If she was there, the crowd hid her. Eyes wide, he stared, trying to find one friendly face amid so many.

He found something, but not what he wanted. There were two serious-looking men, cloaked and hooded, forging their way towards him. The glimpse he caught of one’s face suggested Wasp-kinden to him.

What were they going to do, stuck here in a crowded street? His mind furnished plenty of options. A swift knife-blade, a sagging body. The heedless citizens of Helleron would not pause in their steps to tend to an ailing halfbreed foreigner.

They were closing in now, like fish through shallow water, and Tynisa was nowhere to be seen. With a cold feeling in his heart he turned and began running again. He heard the commotion behind him as they picked up speed as well, while he had a heavy bag to haul and knew that he was no great runner.

And he did not know Helleron well, but he did not let that stop him. He took the first street left, hurtled down it as fast as he could manage, ignoring the shouts, the curses, the occasional drawn blade, as he barged past anyone who got in his way. He left a trail of confusion that any fool could follow, but his followers had to wade through it too.

‘Stop, thief!’ one of them shouted, and abruptly the crowd ahead of him was turning, all eyes fixed on the halfbreed and his bag. Totho gritted his teeth and tried to pick up speed, but his legs were already giving it their all. A solid-looking Ant-kinden tried to bar his way, and Totho ducked low, rammed a shoulder into the man’s chest and knocked him flat. Totho stumbled over the falling man, somehow kept his feet and took a right turn the moment it was offered him. Another dirty little alley, and a short one too. Then there was a crossroads with one even smaller so he turned left.

At first he feared there was no way out. Then he spotted an even narrower passage, roofed over by the overhanging walls of houses. It was now his only way out.

There was someone lurking in the mouth of it, a twisted figure shrouded in a cloak. Totho lowered his shoulder again. At the last moment the figure fled on before him, and he saw that it was now beckoning.

What have I got myself into? There was still the pounding of feet behind him, and he hurtled into the gloomy alleyway bag-first, pushing it ahead of him and unable to see a thing. Someone was shouting, ‘Come on, boy! Come on!’ from up ahead, the cry echoing madly, jangling with his own breathing, the echo of his boots, the cries of his pursuers.

‘Duck, boy, duck!’ the voice yelled, and without thinking he went down, jarring his chin on the tools in his bag as he landed in an inch of filthy water.

Something sped over his head. He looked back quickly to see his two pursuers silhouetted against the tunnel mouth, one halted and one already falling. When the black shadow of his body hit the ground, Totho recognized the sharp spine of a crossbow bolt standing proud of it.

The second man charged forward, and the tunnel was suddenly lit by the fire spitting from his hand. He must have guessed he could get to the mystery assailant before the crossbow was recocked, but another bolt struck him straight in the chest even as he loosed his sting. The harsh impact told Totho that the victim had been wearing armour and that it had not helped. Another two missiles zipped overhead, taking the Wasp in the shoulder and the gut, and he staggered back, sword falling from his fingers. At last he fell.

Totho’s own sword was in his hand, and he crouched behind his bag and waited, peering into the darkness.

‘Who are you?’

‘Good question,’ rasped the voice of the stranger. ‘I’m the one who just saved your life. That good enough for you?’

‘No,’ Totho said firmly.

‘Does the name Stenwold mean anything to you?’ the stranger asked.

‘And if it did, why should I trust you? I’ve. . relying on the word of strangers. . hasn’t turned out so well recently,’ Totho finally got the words out. In truth he was terrified because he could not see the man at all, but he himself would be silhouetted, just as the Wasps had been.

‘Founder’s mark, boy!’ the stranger snapped impatiently. ‘All right, moment of truth. Blink and you’ll miss it. The name’s Scuto. Did Stenwold at least tell you that much?’

‘Scuto?’

‘Ringing a bell, is it?’

It was, but there was more to consider than that. Founder’s mark. It was an oath Totho had heard from artificers at Collegium who had arrived to study there from Helleron. In truth it meant nothing, for a native Helleren might have been working for either side in this conflict. It was an artificer’s oath, though, and he decided to let its familiarity carry the vote.

‘All right,’ he said, standing up wearily. ‘I’ve got a sword here. I’m not giving it up. If you’ve got somewhere. . a bit drier to go, then. . well. .’ Wearily he shouldered his dripping bag.

‘Good boy,’ came the voice of the stranger. ‘Now you just follow me.’

‘I can’t see you.’

‘Then just walk straight. Ain’t no way out of this alley but the way we’re both going.’

The taverna went by the name of the Merraia, just like the one in Collegium where Stenwold had outlined this ill-fated errand to them. Inside it were three low-ceilinged storeys, with a central open space for the airborne and a rope ladder for the rest. The bottom storey was open to the street on one side, and there Che and Salma took a table where they could watch the traffic.

Unlike the Collegium place, which had been a haunt of the locals, a good half of this taverna’s clientele were Fly-kinden, as though they really had set up a little slice of their warren-city of Merro here in Helleron. Most of the surrounding buildings also seemed to be adapted to that diminutive people’s stature and practices, with ground-floor doors and windows boarded up, high windows added into walls, and probably fallback hatches opening in the roofs.

The other patrons of the taverna were not the sort to ask questions of a pair of fugitives, lest they themselves become the subject of questioning in return. Che saw Beetles, Spiders, halfbreeds, and a few others who must have belonged to kinden she had never encountered before. Each table was the hub of a little business deal, over food and wine and the music of a zither.

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked. Salma shrugged. His customary smile was absent.

‘We have to look for the others,’ she insisted.

‘It’s a big city,’ Salma said. ‘I didn’t even realize cities this big existed. Shon Fhor, heart of the whole Commonweal, isn’t this big. I could fly over this place every day for a year and I’d not see them if they were on a rooftop waving a flag.’

Che opened her mouth, shut it again immediately.

‘Not that I won’t,’ he said. He downed the shallow bowl of wine and refilled it from the jug their host had provided.

‘We need help,’ said Che. ‘Uncle Sten has people here, so if we can only make contact. .’

‘Stenwold’s friends are compromised,’ he said seriously. ‘As you saw, they already managed to turn Bolwyn.’

A shiver went through Che’s stomach as she remembered what she had seen, and she put down her own bowl. ‘Salma, I’m going to say something very strange.’

That brought a hint of his smile back at last. ‘That’s something new?’

‘Salma, when I saw Bolwyn, just before everything went wrong, he. .’ She put a hand to her forehead, feeling abruptly tired and frightened. ‘He. . I thought he. . He seemed to. .’ She pursed her lips in frustration at her inability to get the thought out. ‘He wasn’t Bolwyn — just for a moment. I know that sounds mad. I just. . I can’t explain it. It wasn’t make-up or a mask, and it wasn’t some new Art thing, because. .’

‘Because you always know Art when you see it,’ Salma put in for her. ‘Like that thing the Wasps do, with their lightning. That’s Art.’

‘And this wasn’t. It. .’ She shuddered. ‘It was horrible. I don’t know what it was.’ Reviewing her last few words she felt abruptly disgusted with herself. ‘I’m sorry, I must have imagined it. There are more important things. .’

‘It must have been magic,’ Salma told her.

She laughed. ‘Of course, that’s just what it was. Magic.’

He continued to look at her, his slight smile still there, until she realized that he was being quite serious.

‘Magic?’ she asked him. ‘Salma, no offence, but there’s no such thing as magic. That’s just something that primitive people believe, or at least that people believed in before the revolution. Moth-kinden and that kind of thing, I mean. Come on now, magic?’

‘Primitive people, is it?’ His smile widened. ‘Like my people?’

‘Your people are sophisticated people, civilized people. Or that’s what you’re always telling us.’

He placed a hand on hers across the table, not as a gesture of intimacy but to impress on her the import of his words. ‘I believe in magic, Che. I’ve seen magic done. My Kin-obligate — in the place where I grew up, the prince there had a seer in his privy council who could see into the future.’

‘Salma, it’s easy enough to take a guess at what might happen. It’s a trick for the credulous, really.’

‘I saw him conjure up the soul of a dead man, and question it.’

Now it was her turn to smile. ‘I’m sure that there was a rational explanation. Smoke and mirrors and that kind of thing.’

‘The dead man was my father.’

She stopped whatever was about to come out of her mouth, and instead emptied her bowl of wine.

‘I heard him tell me about the Battle of Shan Real, where he had died. When I later heard the story from a soldier who had been there, it was all absolutely as my father’s shade described it.’

‘But Salma, that old wizard could already have heard it from a soldier as well — maybe someone fleeing the battle, ahead of the rest.’

Neither his gaze nor his smile faltered.

She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to offend you, Salma. You’re a friend — the best friend anyone could ask for. You saved my life and my uncle put his trust in you, but I don’t believe in magic. I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘Of course. I won’t tell you about the Silver Faces then, because that wouldn’t change anything.’

‘And why would it change anything?’

He was openly grinning at her now, so that she still could not tell whether he was making fun or not. ‘Oh it’s just a legend, in any case, from long ago. It was said that they could capture your reflection in a mirror, you see. It was said, that way, they could get to look like anyone.’

Che’s stomach twisted again, seeing in her mind’s eye Bolwyn’s shifting face, but she fought it down. I do not believe in magic.

‘They were the very first spies, apparently, and the best,’ Salma continued, voice low like a man telling a ghost story. ‘A secret order of intelligencers. No man could tell them apart from those they copied. They were just a myth, you’ll say, and I’m sure you’re right. True, they’re reported as fact in the chronicles of the Commonweal: from when we used them against our enemies, when our enemies used them against us. But this was long ago, before your revolution, and many strange things are reported in the earliest annals, that no one today, no young Beetle-kinden lass, anyway, would ever credit.’ He laughed at her expression that, behind its attempted defiance, now had a small child’s wide-eyed awe at the inexplicable. ‘Remember, your revolution never reached us, so we’re just ignorant primitives.’

‘It’s impossible to tell if you’re being serious.’

‘I hope so,’ he agreed. ‘Now, how are we going to track down Tynisa and Totho?’

‘Well, unless you can just magic them out of your robe,’ Che said, a little archly, ‘then I had better hunt down my relatives in Helleron, because they’ll know this city so at least they can help us look.’

It was a slum that Totho was led to. There was no other word for it. The skyline was dominated by the smokestacks of a factory whose long, uneven bulk rambled from here all the way down to the river. There were no windows in the pitted expanse of wall that now faced them, though huddled up to that blind countenance were hundreds of crooked little homes. Each had been built from whatever was ready to hand: wood, stone, brick and pieces of metal made each one an individual eyesore. There was no plan to them, either individually or in their general arrangement. The pathways between them were crooked, in-turning, shadowed both by the shacks and by the looming factory. The ground was little more than mud, under which fragmented cobbles occasionally shifted enough to twist an ankle.

Totho guessed that much of the slum’s populace must be out working, perhaps in that very factory, but there were still plenty of people about to watch him pass. Many were children, all thin and dirty, all staring at him. He had expected to be accosted, asked for money, but they kept their distance. He realized this was because his sword was still in his hand and, after that realization, it stayed there.

Depressingly, a large number of these people were halfbreeds. Most were Ant-Beetle crosses, just like himself, but there were some he could not even begin to identify, the mongrel results of a succession of taboo unions, or perhaps the get of kinden he did not yet know.

The adults he saw were evidently not interested in legal employment. One and all they gave him a level, assessing stare, but they had seen his guide and let him be. His guide was well known, even in shrouded outline.

Totho himself had already been given enough chance to study that uneven form. The man made a great show of his awkward, rapid shambling gait, but Totho noticed the way the cloak was pushed up and outwards by whatever was hidden underneath, and guessed this man was wearing armour, something outlandish and irregular, like some flashy prize-fighter. None of this made Totho happy about the present deal but if he stopped following now he would be lost, and then he would rapidly be prey.

His guide turned abruptly aside and went over to a door in one of the sloping shacks. A quick fumble with a key and he was inside, holding the door open and gesturing for Totho to follow him. Follow he did, but not without qualms and a close grip on his sword.

There was precious little light inside, and his benefactor seemed to have instantly disappeared. It was only when the back wall started to glow softly that he realized it was only a drape, with a lamp now lit behind it. He pushed his way carefully past the curtain.

‘Nine,’ said the voice of his guide as he did so. ‘Nine separate buildings.’ It answered his question.

From the outside this small terrace of ramshackle huts had looked no different from the others. On the inside it was revealed as all one, a single dwelling. The contours were, of necessity, irregular, and there were no internal walls, just posts to keep the undulating ceiling where it should be. More hanging drapes of hessian and wool were all his host had to differentiate sleeping quarters from kitchen, storeroom from workshop. Workshop?

Totho stared. Of all the things he had thought of on entering that door, it was not this, and yet here was something as familiar to him as his own name. Most of the floorspace was given over to benches on which half a dozen mechanisms had been anatomied for repair. Between the benches he recognized a big upright grinder, a bandsaw, a set of optic lenses and a punch-press. It was almost like coming home.

‘I took you for the type,’ his host remarked, and Totho snapped from his reverie. In his fascination he had almost forgotten the man existed.

‘Thank you for. .’ He had decided to trust this man, and then, turning to look at him, he choked on his words. Scuto had cast his cloak back and he was indeed wearing armour, but it was an old leather breastplate that had been crudely cut to fit him. The rest of his shape was entirely his own.

As a child back in Collegium, Totho had watched puppet shows on occasion, and even then he had been more interested in how it was done than in the stories and jokes. There had been one puppet that turned up in most of them which was known as the Malefactor and existed to get other puppets into trouble and so start off the plot. It had a great hooked nose that almost met its upward-curving chin, and Scuto looked just like that long-remembered manikin. Between nose and chin his mouth appeared as a crooked line in skin that was nut-brown and slightly shiny, and above the nose his eyes were small and suspicious. He was frankly hideous. It was not even the face that made him so, or the hunched back, for he bristled everywhere with curving spikes. There were small ones the size of fish hooks, and others as long as knife blades, and they sprouted from him at random and all over. His breastplate, his very garments, were roughly cut to avoid these, but still his tunic was darned a hundred times over, and ripped even so. It was a wonder, Totho thought helplessly, that this man had not cut himself to ribbons.

‘Yeah, well,’ Scuto said sourly. ‘You ain’t a picture yourself, halfbreed.’ He shuffled over to one of the benches and put down his crossbow. It was a sleek repeater with a high magazine at the top, holding ten quarrels at least.

‘I–I’m sorry but. .’ Even the sight of the crossbow could not keep Totho’s attention off the man himself.

‘But what, halfway? I’m a pureblood, me.’ Scuto’s smile showed barbed snaggle-teeth. ‘You don’t get so many of my kind down here, but the Empire knows us. They can’t stand us. Wonder why. Thorn Bug-kinden, that’s me, so live with it.’

‘You mean there’s. .’

‘More of us?’ Scuto actually cackled, which improved his appearance not one bit. ‘Way north of here, boy, there’s more of us than anyone could sensibly want. And you know the real killer? There ain’t one of us quite like the other. You look on me, and you see a real ugly bug. Well that’s what I see in the mirror, boy, and that’s what I see when I look at all my folk.’

Totho nodded. ‘I think I can. . understand that.’

‘Bet you can, you being a hybrid boy and all.’ Scuto looked him up and down, from a vantage point focused around Totho’s chest. ‘So, you going to admit to being one of Stenwold Maker’s little helpers?’

‘I suppose I am.’ At this point it didn’t seem that there was much point denying it.

‘That bag there says you’re an artificer, boy. You just carrying it for someone else, or can you do something useful with your life?’

‘I’ve received my accredits from the Great College,’ Totho said with pride.

‘Don’t mean squat to me, boy. Till you show me you can do something, you ain’t no artificer to me.’

‘Oh really?’ Totho heaved his bag onto a bench and began rifling through it. ‘How do you keep all this stuff here anyway? You couldn’t keep it secret. They’d. . hear you milling through the walls. Why hasn’t it been stolen or something?’

Scuto spat, not as an insult, Totho guessed, but some local way of showing emphasis.

‘Listen, boy, in this neighbourhood I’m the man. That means half the eyes and spies out there are on my books. That means there are swords and crossbows out there that point where I tell them, and when I ask it, I can get a real doctor to come out here who knows he’ll be safe and get properly paid. It all adds up, because anyone out there who means me ill will run foul of the locals unless he’s got a damn army, believe you me. What with all that and your man Maker’s work to do, it’s a wonder I find time for my actual occupation.’

‘Which is artificing.’ Totho pulled a device from his bag and handed it over.

‘That it is.’ Scuto took the air-battery in his thorny hands and squinted at it. His look was suspicious at first, then surprised and at last appreciative. ‘Not bad work, boy. Very neat, very small. You’ve got good hands there. Pistons, is it? For powering engines?’

‘I was going to use it for a weapon. I. . like weapons,’ Totho said awkwardly.

‘Not a lad your age that doesn’t,’ said Scuto, grinning. ‘This has potential. If Stenwold’s work leaves you any time free, I’d like to see what you do with it.’

‘Stenwold’s work?’ Totho’s instant smile suddenly soured. ‘What happened with your man?’

Scuto grimaced. ‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I do! Three of my friends are still out there, if they haven’t already been caught.’ He bit his lip. ‘I should never have left them. I thought they’d be right behind me. And all because your man sold us to the Wasps!’

‘No he didn’t,’ Scuto said, but he was looking down at his hands as they toyed with the air-battery.

‘Then how do you explain what happened? He led us right into an ambush!’

‘No he didn’t,’ said Scuto again. ‘On account of this morning I fished his body out of the reagent vats in the factory right behind us. Someone had dumped the corpse for a quick get-rid-of job, but picked the wrong vat.’

‘This morning? But-’

‘Oh I know, boy.’ When Scuto shrugged, the spines rippled across his shoulders and back again like grass in the wind. ‘I was watching at Benevolence Square, and I tracked you from there. I saw the bastard, and for sure, it was Bolwyn, a man I’ve known for three years. And yet his body’s in the poorgrave five streets from here, and has been since near dawn.’ The Thorn Bug bared his teeth again. ‘Beats me, boy. Beats me.’