Empire in Black and Gold

Twelve

There was a Fly-run eatery on Bleek Street where Sinon Halfway, leader of the Halfway House cartel, held court. Court it was, too, Tynisa realized at once. Malia brought her into a long room decked out in Fly style, with a low table taking up much of the floor. Some half-dozen Fly-kinden staff were serving three dozen men and women, and it was evident to Tynisa from first glance that there was a right end and a wrong end of the table to be kneeling at. The right end was closest to the enthroned figure of Sinon Halfway himself.

He was a lean man just turning to fat around the middle, due to the few years now when he had not personally taken up a sword to defend his empire. He was dressed like a man about to flee the city with all his wealth upon him, but she saw that all of them were, more or less, for aside from a few who looked ostentatiously spartan, the gangsters sported chains and rings, amulets and jewelled gorgets, even in one case a mail shirt made from coins, good silver Standards of Helleron mint. Sinon would have been worth, in gold and gems alone, as much as half the table, and she understood that it was a status thing. A wealthy man who hid his light under a bushel would gain no respect for that here.

The name told true. Sinon was a halfbreed, and she guessed that he was Moth-kinden interbred with the pale-skinned Ants of Tark. What should have been an unpleasant mottling had instead left him with milky skin traced with veins and twists of grey, like marble. It was an exotic, oddly attractive sight. His hair was dark, worn long over his shoulders in a Spider style. His eyes were just dark pupils circled in white, without irises. The melange of his ancestry had conspired to make a man at once unnerving and compelling.

‘So Malia has brought me a gift,’ he said, and the conversation about the table immediately stopped, each gangster looking across or craning over to see her. Malia left her side then, taking her place at Sinon’s right hand.

‘Delightful,’ said Sinon. His mouth and voice were amused, his eyes unreadable. ‘But I’m told that you’re not just here for ornament. Malia says you can fight. What’s your name, Spiderchild?’

‘Tynisa, Master Sinon.’ She hadn’t meant the honorific. Some holdover from childhood had brought it out of her.

‘And well-mannered too, such a rare combination. And you understand that you owe me a debt, a debt that Malia here has passed on to me.’

‘I’ve been told it,’ Tynisa replied. A murmur of laughter passed through the gangsters at her attitude. Only those closest to the head of the table were untouched by it.

‘And can you fight?’ Sinon asked her politely.

‘I can.’

‘Well, then, there may be a place for you at my table,’ Sinon said. ‘But I understand you need my help, Spiderchild. Malia’s already told me your little story. Help me and then perhaps I can spare some help for you.’

She realized that she was reacting too much, taking too little control. She narrowed her eyes, clenched her fists, stared at Sinon. ‘So,’ she demanded. ‘Where do I sit?’

There was a ragged murmur of approval from the gangsters, but Sinon held up a hand for silence, and got it. ‘Don’t get too fond of her,’ he warned his people. ‘She doesn’t know our traditions yet. You sit, Spiderchild, where you want, but be aware that for you to have any elbow room everyone moves down a seat. Now you tell me where you sit.’

Tynisa let herself pause. She would not jump as soon as Sinon cracked the whip. Has it come to this? she thought. What would Stenwold say? Sinon was talking about fighting for blood, just to join in his little clique. The fiefs of Helleron had harsh and simple rules. At what point do I become one of them? When I draw their blood? When I take their place?

She wondered if she could still refuse now, if she could flee — a sudden dash down the hall, out of the building, onto the unknown streets of Helleron. And then what? She would never find Che or the others on her own. She needed help, and this thief, this killer, was apparently the only help she had.

And beneath all that was another dark voice, telling her that they had questioned her skill, that they wished to see her blade drawn. It is your duty and your pleasure to oblige them. .

She walked down the line of the table, seeing who met her gaze, who avoided it. There were a lot down the far end of the table that she knew she could beat, humiliate even, without worry. They were the rabble, the desperate hangers-on just clutching at the edges of Sinon’s favour. But if she was going to do this, she was going to do it properly.

She paced back towards the table’s head, feeling the hum of appreciation as they began to ask themselves just how daring she was going to be. The gangsters were a motley lot: Beetles, Ants, Flies, Spiders, plenty of half-breeds, and a few she could not name. Whatever their race, towards the head of the table they met her stare levelly. They had scars, most of them, amidst the jewellery, so it had been a fight for them to get where they were, and it would be a fight for her to take it from them. The few of them who did not seem to be warriors looked at her without fear, and from that she guessed at the presence of some stand-in or bodyguard to protect their useful talents from needless harm. Artificers, accountants, intelligencers and the like, no doubt. Sinon would have need of those.

She looked up to the very head of the table, at Sinon himself. He was watching her with great interest and she sent him one of her best smiles to show him she was not afraid of him.

To his right was Malia, of course, and Tynisa felt that to challenge her would be bad grace, and she was also not sure she could win. The woman had held onto her place at Sinon’s right, where anyone could call her out for it. That bespoke a truth behind her boasts earlier.

On Sinon’s left sat a giant. Standing, he would be at least seven feet tall, his head brushing the ceiling. His skin was dead white, not the translucent pale of an albino but a waxy blank whiteness she had never seen before. Strange as that was, it was nothing to his lower jaw, which jutted out in a snarl of upwards-pointing fangs, or his hands that sported great bone blades curving from thumb and forefinger, eight inches long at the least. His eyes, above a flat nose and that grotesque jaw, were small and calm, and he cupped the wine bowl in his palm and three fingers with great care. He was more, she decided, than a simple brute. His yellow eyes were keenly picking her apart, evaluating her, and she decided that he would be too much, too soon.

Remember Che and Salma. Remember who you are shedding blood for. Or, if the worst came to the worst and the Empire had beaten her to it, at least Sinon’s people could become her tool for revenge. The thought brought a sudden fire to her. So I draw a little criminal blood today, and how much Wasp blood tomorrow?

She had her blade out in a moment, startling those nearest to her, but she was pointing across the table, to the giant’s left-hand neighbour. He was a pale Ant from Tark, and he stood right away with an eagerness that spoke of a few tricks she did not know about. He looked like Adax from the College duelling society, and she decided that she had always wanted to take that particular man down a peg. Even his image here would do.

‘Where do we fight?’ she asked.

‘Why, right here, where we can all see, but try not to tread on the food,’ Sinon said with a lazy gesture.

With deliberate ease the Ant-kinden drew a pair of shortswords from beneath the table. He grinned at her, and then glanced at his comrades. There were three other Tarkesh Ants here for dinner, and he singled them out especially. She saw it then: his mind and theirs would be as one during this fight. Whatever he missed, they would see on his behalf. There would be no surprising him.

‘Two-sword boy, are you?’ She felt proud of the calm humour in her voice, though inside she had begun to think that she had made a serious mistake. With a swift dart she snatched an eating knife from the nearest diner and balanced it in her left hand. ‘I suppose that evens the odds a little.’

The spectators gave her a scattered laugh. She took three steps back and settled into her stance, rapier extended, blunt knife held back and high as though she would make the killing stroke with it.

Their fighting space was a strip three feet wide and twenty long, and she hoped that her longer blade would tell in it. He did not seem to be worried, though, standing still down the length of their battlefield, relaxed and eager.

‘First blood,’ Sinon warned them. ‘It’s been a quiet day so far. I don’t want a body spoiling it for me. Of course, if first blood is last blood, well, what can you do?’ The halfbreed licked his lips, obviously a man to enjoy a little dinner entertainment. ‘Well off you go then. Don’t keep us in suspense.’

Tynisa moved first, and almost had him then, a quick step, step and lunge and he was almost on the end of her sword. His spies in the audience called him to it just in time, though; and then he was on her.

He fought left and right, attacks from either side coming in without pattern, a constant driving dance of swordwork. His face, behind it, was set, without clues for her. He drove her back and back until her instincts told her the wall was just an inch behind her back heel. As he came in at her again she bounced backwards, got a foot on the wall and pushed. His left sword went past her, close enough to snag her tunic, and her rapier lanced over his head. She followed it, diving part-over, part-past him, trying to crack his nose with her elbow as she did. He swayed back, though, warned again by his collaborators, and she landed past, rolling just once and coming up on her feet.

He was already at her, driving in through a storm of applause from the crowd. She had his measure now. He came from left and right but his stock of moves was limited, the same strikes mirroring each other every time. She began to fend him off, sliding his blades off her own and then turning parries into ripostes, until they were in the middle of their narrow slice of arena, and he was no longer driving her before him. All the while she kept the eating knife poised, glinting in the light, always in his eyeline, always on his mind.

She realized that she had already made up her mind how to end this, perhaps even before she started. Even as she kept him at the length of her rapier, outside his reach, the plan she had not even known about was made plain to her, and she saw that it was good.

She went on the attack, seemed to mis-step. Abruptly she was too close, playing into the range of his blades. He took the chance she offered, by accident or not. She dragged her sword in, moving it like light and shadow, both of his blades skittering off its hand-guard and quillons. The eating knife darted in.

It came from above him for the top of his head, but the voices in his head were shouting for him to watch for it. He twisted faster than she had thought, his blades coming up to catch the blunt knife. She was already a step back and the rapier was inside his guard. With utter delicacy, she struck.

She had intended to pink his shoulder, first blood as Sinon had said, but her blade laid open the side of his neck, and he went down in a startling abundance of red. For a moment she thought he might get up again, leaning on his sword and spitting at her, but then he fell forward, and she knew that he was dead.

Looking down now, with the heat of the moment cooling on her, she realized that she had absolutely no right to beat him. She was, after all, merely a good duellist for the College circuit. With a wood and bronze blade she had been better than most, but worse than some.

With a live blade in her hand, where death was at her shoulder and not just the gain or forfeit of a game, it seemed she had a talent for reddening her blade with other people’s blood. She had not drawn this blade in anger without having a man die over it and yesterday it had taken four of Malia’s men to catch her, even exhausted and confused as she must have been. And she had blooded them all.

She had a talent, for sure. If Sinon had his way, she might even have a vocation. The thought did not sit well with her, but a moment before, with the fierce fire of victory on her, she would have welcomed it.

What am I becoming?

She looked at Halfway. There was a commotion all along the table, some applauding and some cursing her, but in her mind it was just her and the gangster chief here now. She met his strange eyes and her smile, however forced, challenged him.

‘Malia didn’t exaggerate a word of it,’ he said, his followers quieting even as he spoke. ‘In fact, I think she even played it down a little.’ He glanced at the Ant woman, who was looking ever so slightly concerned. Tynisa thought back to their first meeting, and wondered just what might have happened had she herself pushed it to a fight.

Better not to know. They were right when they said she needed them. Everything had gone wrong and her comrades were scattered to the winds. If this gang of murderers and blackguards was her only tool, then she would grasp it by the hilt.

Smiling so sweetly, she cleaned her blade and went to sit beside the giant, just a seat away from Sinon himself.

Elias Monger was a busy man. Rather than leave them in his house to fret, he had suggested that they come to see the leading sights of Helleron with him, such sights consisting of his commercial holdings and factories. Che wondered if he was trying to impress Salma the prince with his wealth and productivity. If so, that plan had fallen at the first hurdle.

Around them, the cavernous space boomed and thundered, as though what they were making here was not crossbow bolts but elemental weather. It was order on a grand scale: the ranks of great forges and presses and tooling machines that were never still, the constant onward progressing, each pair of hands only a tiny part of the grand scheme. The sheer industry of it, the fact that someone had worked all this out, this machined sequence, and then made it real as one of Elias Monger’s factory floors, was beyond Che’s ability to conceive.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘I thought you Beetles didn’t keep slaves.’ Salma’s bleak gaze took in the long, gloomy, toiling room and found little in it he liked.

‘Slaves?’ Che said blankly. ‘These aren’t slaves.’

‘Aren’t they?’

She put her hands on her hips. ‘No, they aren’t. They’re here to earn a wage. They’re here of their own free will. You’re just saying that because you don’t understand what they’re working at.’

‘Free will?’ Salma saw, in that long room, more people than he could readily count. They were almost shoulder to shoulder at the benches, each repeating some action over and over. Some were tending pole-lathes, others shaping shards of chitin. Some at the back fed a row of forges whose red glow shed more light than the grime-covered windows. Others poured molten metal into moulds, and others still honed the edges of the tiny pieces resulting, or freed them from the casts. Each man or woman had a fragment of a job, performed over and over. Each was utterly absorbed by it, working as fast as they could, passing over forever to the next pair of hands in line. Salma wondered what would happen if, in their same free will, they decided not to work.

‘Oh, lose the long face,’ Che snapped at him, annoyed. ‘So they don’t do things this way in the Commonweal. This is industry, Salma. This is how things happen in the Lowlands. We can’t all spend three years making the perfect sword or whatever.’

‘I don’t think I can stay in here,’ Salma said. ‘I’m going to wait over by the door where there’s light and air.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, nettled. He caught her gaze as he turned, though, and something must have communicated itself to her. Looking back across the room there was a moment, just a moment, when she saw the hundreds of labouring bodies and wondered: free will, yes, but how many of them had a family an eighth of an inch from starving? How many had come to Helleron to make their fortunes and now could not afford to leave?

At the far end of the factory were stacked bundles of crossbow bolts being carefully counted by an overseer. Each day this one factory shipped hundreds of them, made for a price nowhere in the Lowlands could match. Business was not good enough for Uncle Elias, though. Clearly some part of his grand machine was not keeping pace with the rest.

‘I don’t care how you do it,’ she heard him complain as she approached. ‘Hire more workers or get this lot to work faster, but we’re down almost five parts per hundred, and the orders just keep mounting up. I want next tenday’s turnover to be the same as the last, and the tenday after to be even better.’

The Ant foreman nodded glumly. ‘It will be done.’

‘Good.’ Elias turned to see Che. ‘How do you like my factory?’

‘It’s very impressive, uncle.’ She had begun calling him that, rather than cousin, because he was Stenwold’s age.

‘What does your friend think?’

‘I don’t think he’s really used to it,’ she said.

‘Well, the Commonwealers never were good customers. A bit snobby about their own craftsmanship, if you ask me.’ Elias shrugged. ‘It’s always the same with the Inapt: they want everything handcrafted to thousand-year-old techniques that take forever, and then wonder why everyone else has a bigger army.’

‘Did you ask the foreman about Tynisa and Totho?’

‘He’s seen nobody, but Helleron is a big place. . Excuse me.’

A messenger had just flown into the factory, a young Fly-kinden with wings glittering red in the forgelight. He landed at a run and virtually threw himself at Elias’s feet.

‘Master Monger?’ The youth was quite out of breath.

‘That’s me. Is it from Tarhaven’s delegation?’

‘No, Master. From Officer Breaken at the north-west shaft.’ The Fly handed over a scroll and retired, chest still heaving.

Elias cursed quietly to himself and read the scroll by firelight. His face, when he looked at the messenger, was brutal, and Che thought he would strike the unfortunate man. ‘Is this it?’ he demanded. ‘Is this all the report Breaken knows how to make?’

‘He. .’ The messenger flinched back. ‘He asks for you to come at once, with-’

‘I see what he asks for. Does he have any idea how much this costs?’ Elias’s hands wrung the scroll and the Fly-kinden stepped further back from him.

‘Uncle Elias?’ Che asked, as much to distract his attention from the wretched messenger as anything else. Staring at her, Elias forced on a smile for Che’s benefit.

‘Is something wrong?’ she prompted him.

‘Just. .’ He let out a shuddering sigh. ‘Just business. Cousin Stenwold has no idea how. . delicate things can be, here in Helleron.’ He looked past her at Salma, standing pale and wan in the forgelight. ‘Do you think your friend would enjoy a little mountain air, Cheerwell?’

She nodded cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’

‘This. .’ He shook the mangled scroll at her. ‘I have some business north of the city, one of my mining concerns. Perhaps some clearer air would do you good. I’m told our local brand can have an effect on strangers.’

Che dearly hoped that Salma would find some more solace in the mountains, but, knowing what she did about the Helleron mines, she had an uneasy feeling about how he would react. She nodded cautiously, but it was to Elias’s back as he was already marching for the factory doors. The messenger scurried after him, and Elias called over his shoulder. ‘Get me another twenty men. I don’t care who you hire them from so long as they’re good for the work. Flares, crossbows. And a repeating ballista — make it two. I’m going to cut the heart out of this now.’

Che and Salma exchanged surprised glances. It seemed Uncle Elias was going to war.

Helleron had been founded where it was because of the mountains. The Tornos range was a miner’s delight, and most of all it was shot through with the richest iron deposits in the Lowlands. What had started as a small foundry town four centuries ago was now the hub of all the Lowlands’ trade and mercantile ventures. Iron and steel were the body and bone of the city, consumed by it in vast quantities, refined in its organs, cast forth in a thousand shapes, and most of them warlike.

Salma had made a rough journey of it, a rigid passenger in the jolting convoy of steam automotives that clattered out from Helleron. It was the motion. It was the smell, it was, Che realized, the very fact of it. He had experienced none of this back in his distant home. Even in Collegium he had always flown or walked. Now he was travelling on a conveyance from another world, and it was making him ill. His golden skin had gone verdigris green by the time Elias called a halt in the shadow of the mountains.

It was not exactly the clear mountain air and scenic views that Elias had promised them. Salma still wore his smile like a shield against the world, but she could see the strain telling in his eyes. They had disembarked in a great quarry, where the stone of the foothills had been scooped away over decades. Gaping, propped-up holes in the sheer rock were the shallow mines, and above them a vast winch-and-pulley system creaked as its steam engine laboured to bring up the next load of men and ore from the utter depths. The quarry floor was laced with rails, and one wall formed the support for a lean-to as large as a castle, where the ore smelting took place. Elias had explained that it was cheaper to smelt it here and then ship the metal over to the city, or at least it had been ten years ago. In the light of recent developments he was having to rethink the profitability of his enterprise.

Elias had begun trying to explain the mine to them but there were a dozen different people with claims on his time, and in the end Che and Salma were left like two baffled islands in the middle of all the bustle. Something had gone wrong here, she saw, spotting a pair of big drilling engines that were obviously out of commission, and one of them blackened and burned. A team of artificers was furiously stripping them both, arguing over what had been done and how best to fix it. There were soldiers here, too: Beetle-kinden guardsmen in Elias’s employ, wearing chain mail and breastplates, and with crossbows to hand. They kept watching the sky, Che noticed. They were clearly nervous.

‘What do you think is going on here?’ she asked Salma.

‘Do you think I can guess? This is a world I have no dealings with,’ he told her, a little more life returning to him. ‘I was about to ask you.’

‘I’d guess some competitor of Elias,’ she mused. ‘I get the impression they take their business very seriously in Helleron.’

‘Never a truer word spoken,’ said Salma, heartfelt.

There was a hauling engine just setting off for the city, she noticed, with crates of iron taking up most of the flatbed behind the stacks of its wood-burning furnace. But it carried three long, shrouded burdens as well, surely nothing other than the corpses of miners or guardsmen. She had heard Elias giving orders to the driver a moment before, issuing instructions to bring back some artillery. Whatever had happened here, nobody believed it was over.

At last Elias turned back to them, still with a half-dozen menials waiting anxiously to report. ‘This is a wretched business,’ he said, twisting the rings on his fingers. ‘I sometimes wonder why I ever got into it.’

‘What happened here?’ Che asked him. ‘Who attacked them?’

Elias sighed. ‘This was going on when I first took to the factories, but then we made the treaty and everything went quiet. Ideal time to get into the mining game, you’d have thought. So look at me now: two days behind on deliveries and I don’t even want to think about the repair costs. It’s not as though Helleron’s ever packed with tramp artificers kicking their heels for want of work, and now there’ll be a half-dozen other mine owners bidding against me.’

‘But who did it? Someone wants to force you out and take over?’

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Force me out is right, but not the rest of it. If they even wanted the workings here, then at least I’d understand. There’d be a basis for negotiation. I’d even sell up, for a price. But these bastards — excuse my language, Cheerwell — these wretches, they just want us gone.’ He saw her confusion and said, ‘It’s the Moth-kinden from Tharn. Just because they like to mooch around up there in their caves chanting and mumbling to themselves, they take offence if anyone actually wants to make use of the place.’

‘Moth-kinden?’ Che couldn’t quite grasp it. ‘But I thought they were-’

‘A gaggle of hermits minding their own business?’ Elias suggested. ‘Think again, Cheerwell. We’ve always had problems with this lot because they’re as militant as they come. They just don’t want us anywhere near their precious sacred mountain, and every time we come to terms about our mining operations, give it just a few years and they’re back. Raids, thefts, murder, and sabotage! Don’t start me on the sabotage. Just because they don’t know what a cog does or how a lever works, it doesn’t mean they can’t find a way to break the most sophisticated equipment when they put their bloody minds to it.’

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to send a messenger to parlay with them?’

‘They’d probably kill anyone I sent to them,’ Elias growled. ‘They only talk when they want to. They come down to us when they’ve had enough. No, if I had my way, I’d get together with the other mine owners and put an airfleet together, sort them out once and for all. For now, though, I’m going to get some repeating ballista, some flarecasters and a squad more crossbowmen, and we’ll see if they’re stupid enough to come back tonight.’

He stormed off, still with a trail of anxious clerks and foremen shadowing him.

Che turned to Salma. ‘You heard that?’

‘Every word,’ he said. ‘And I wondered, once these veins are exhausted, and if the Helleren started looking to the north of here, coming along with their rails and their engines — I wondered what my people’s reaction would be.’

‘You can’t be condoning this!’ she hissed.

He held a hand up, and took her aside to somewhere the miners and their watchmen could not overhear.

‘Until you have heard it from all sides, don’t be so quick to judge. My people could not endure to live with this on our borders, and if we refused them, how long before the Helleren found some excuse to come anyway.’

‘Salma, you’re talking about my people, my family.’ His words hurt her more than she would have thought, and she wondered if that was because she knew there was some truth in them.

‘Well,’ he said with a shrug, ‘it’s moot, as north of here isn’t Commonweal any more anyway.’ His smile cut her with its bitterness. ‘It’s Empire all the way.’