Empire in Black and Gold

Thirteen

Scuto shambled back into his workshop. It had been the best part of an hour since he stepped outside for a whispered conversation with a young Fly-kinden, clearly one of his agents. Totho had spent the time disassembling one of his air-batteries and planning a few improvements to it. He could never just sit idle. His artificer’s hands needed work, to stop his mind from worrying. He jumped up as the Thorn Bug returned.

‘Well,’ Scuto said. ‘Whatever else happened to your friends, the Wasps didn’t get ’em. Looks like all three made a run for it. Shame they didn’t follow you.’

‘Any idea where they ran to?’ Totho asked.

‘In Helleron it’s like leaving tracks in water,’ Scuto said. ‘Still, I have my eyes and my ears, and looks like your girl, the Spider one, went places even I’d not go without an escort. She must have cut through two fiefs at least. People that way don’t like answering questions, but I’ll see what I can do.’ He shook his head. ‘You people, you’re such a mix of craft and cack-handedness. I can’t make you out.’ He settled himself across the workbench from Totho, who heard the scrape of his spines against the wood. ‘You give the Wasps the slip, which is good form, but then you got no fallback arranged, so the four of you just go gadding off through the city. What were you thinking?’

‘We weren’t expecting there would be trouble,’ Totho said. He tried to state it as a reasonable point, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

‘You must always plan a fallback,’ Scuto told him. ‘Last year Sten sent me and some lads to Sarn. Safe enough, you’d think, what with the Ants there behaving ’emselves these days, but we fell real foul. If we’d not had some rendezvous arranged in advance I’d still be there looking for ’em all. Mind you, that was just pure bad luck and accident, ’cos we ran bang into some Arcanum business that had nothing to do with us.’

‘What’s an Arcanum?’

‘If you don’t know, you don’t need to know,’ Scuto told him, and promptly added, ‘Moth-kinden stuff, anyway. Loose cogs, the lot of ’em.’ He put a thorny finger into the workings of the air-battery.

‘Master Scuto, shouldn’t we be. . doing something?’

Scuto raised a thorny eyebrow. ‘Like what, boy? Want to go onto the streets and hand out fliers? Stand on a roof and shout their names?’

‘But-’

‘Sten really did send you out not knowing the half of it,’ the Thorn Bug continued sadly. ‘Boy, a good agent’s got to learn how to wait. My people are asking questions. All we’d do ourselves is get in the way, and maybe get you caught by the Wasps. Founder’s mark, boy, do none of you know anything about the trade? Who are you clowns anyway, really?’

‘Just College students.’ Totho shrugged. ‘Master Maker, I don’t think he meant it to come to this. Not this soon.’

‘That man uses the Great College like his own personal militia,’ grumbled Scuto. ‘You all artificers?’

‘We’re all duellists, I suppose. That was the link. Tynisa and Salma were good at it, anyway. And then there’s Che — Cheerwell, rather. She’s Stenwold’s niece.’ Totho looked at his hands. ‘I hope. . I hope she’s all right. She’s not as tough as the others.’

Scuto made an unpleasant noise that Totho realized was laughter. ‘Sounds as though you’re after the foreman’s daughter,’ he said. A suggestive leer from the Thorn Bug-kinden was worth three from anyone else.

‘I. . well. . A little.’ Totho did not know where to put himself. ‘But, I’m a halfbreed, you know, so. .’

‘So much for that,’ Scuto agreed. ‘Don’t need to tell me, boy. I couldn’t get myself into the worst brothel in Helleron even if I was made of solid gold with platinum clothes.’ He looked Totho over, sympathy sitting awkwardly on his nightmare face. ‘Let’s change the subject, take your mind off things, shall we? Let’s look at this air-battery of yours. Weapons, you reckon?’

‘Once the air pressure is high enough it can be directed out. The force of it is quite remarkable.’ Totho, too was glad to settle on less uncomfortable topics.

Scuto nodded. ‘You ever get your hands on a nailbow?’

‘Only models at the College, but I’ve seen them used. They did a demonstration.’ Despite the hollow, sick feeling in Totho’s stomach when he thought of Che all alone in Helleron, this simple talk of mechanical things was working to calm him.

The Thorn Bug grinned. ‘I love ’em. They work basically on the same principle as this toy of yours, only instead of air pressure they use a firepowder charge to send a bolt as long as your finger through steel plate. Bang! Noisy as all get out, and they jam often as not, and firepowder’s just asking for trouble. I heard that if the nailbow gets too hot, then it just blows itself apart and takes matey the operator with it. So you were thinking of using your bottled air to send a crossbow bolt?’

‘A smaller missile would be better, though. I see what you mean.’

‘Right, tell you another thing.’ Scuto’s grin broadened. ‘Last year this fellow Balkus came to me, kind of an off-and-on friend. Ant renegade from Sarn. He’s a nailbowman. Used to be in their army squad down there until he went rogue. He wanted me to make the thing more reliable. What I did is, I lengthened the barrel that the bolts come out of, and I machined a groove down it, in a spiral. Still jams like a bastard, but when it fires he can get half again as far, without much worry of missing. You reckon this business of yours here would benefit from the same deal?’

Totho turned the idea over in his mind. He could see the reasoning behind it falling into place, and felt strangely excited by it. Nobody at the College had ever taken his ideas seriously. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I absolutely do.’

‘Well, then, while Scuto’s little army is out tracking your friends down, why don’t you and I have a little brainstorming session and see if we can’t make this thing a reality?’

The Halfway House had been quick to accept her. She had been surprised, as she had expected reprisals for the man she killed. There was no comeback, though, even from his countrymen. The moment he had hit the ground he was nothing.

She could easily have forgotten him herself. In the round of greetings, introductions, boasts and invitations that followed, nobody seemed to recall that her new place at the table was still warm from another’s body. Sinon Halfway kept no empty seats. There were always hopefuls, coming off the street, wanting to sit at his table.

Later, he gave her two gold rings and a clasp in the shape of a centipede eating its own tail. ‘You should have these,’ he said laconically.

‘Some girls just expect flowers.’ She examined the pieces critically: heavy and crude, like most of the affectation the Halfway House favoured.

Sinon relaxed back on the pillow next to her. ‘They’re not love tokens, my devious lady. They’re your share of Pallus’s stake, after I took what he owed me.

She tried to see the trinkets in a different light, to attach some emotional significance to them, the estate of a dead man, but she could not. They were also worth more money than she had personally ever held before, even at black-market prices.

Since sitting at his table she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Sinon to discuss her alleged indebtedness to him. She knew the moment was coming, but it was a day and a night now since she had killed the Ant — Pallus, as she had just discovered. She had taken her chances then, sitting high at the table, turning her College games to a deadly serious business. And I did it for Che, and the others, and she could tell herself that as often as she liked.

And Sinon had asked her to his bed. He had not demanded: it was not some tithe he exacted from all the women of the Halfway House. He simply let her know that he had an interest, and in the end she had agreed. She needed to cement her foothold within the fief, and she would have more leverage with him after she had lain with him. Also she had wanted to see him, see the whole of that marbled skin spread out before her. He intrigued her, so unlike the pariah halfbreeds she had previously known. He was a more exciting lover by far than those — fewer than most thought — that she had taken at the College. Exciting because he was older than her, and sly, and exciting because he was dangerous. He was a gangster and a killer and his will now shadowed her life. In lying with him she took hold of some of that power and controlled it. It was an old game.

And yet, as they grappled, the thought had come to her, Is this what it would be like with Salma? and she had tried to see that storm-sky skin for a moment as bright daylight gold.

Now they lay together in the room of a taverna Sinon had picked out, with a dozen of his heavies on watch in the common room below, and he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, the dead man’s gold now off his hands. She could have slit his throat there and then, or perhaps he was secretly tensed, just waiting to see if she would turn on him. Spiders, after all, had a certain reputation.

‘You owe me,’ he said.

‘And was that part of the payment?’

His eyes flicked open. ‘That was something between us, was it not? A mutual benefit?’ To her surprise he sounded just a little hurt. Men and their egos. She smiled at him.

‘So I owe you?’

‘Tynisa, dear lady, you’re someone who gives the impression that you won’t be with us for long, one way or the other. You have your own path and I’d not begrudge you that.’

She raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But you owe me and debts must be paid. If I do not enforce that rule, I’m nothing. You owe me for Malia’s dead man, and you owe me for the help you’ve asked of me. But it’s your choice whether you pay that off all at once, or break it up into pieces.’

‘All at once, if I can,’ she said instantly. ‘No offence.’

‘Honesty never offends me,’ he told her. ‘Which is not to say that I haven’t had men killed for it.’ His expression was infinitely mild, infinitely truthful. ‘I will have a job for you, I think, that will make us quits, and once you’ve done it I already have a lead on your friends.’

Her heart leapt. ‘Stenwold’s family?’

‘No, we tried there but they’ve seen nobody. Another lead, but a good one — only when we’re quits.’

There was a gentle knock on the door.

‘Chief,’ said the voice of the white-skinned giant. ‘It’s starting to move down here.’

‘We’ll be there,’ Sinon called back, and slid out of bed, slipping into his clothes. Tynisa followed suit, taking one more look across the streaked skin of his muscled back before it disappeared beneath his tunic.

‘So what’s this job you want from me?’ she asked.

‘It will depend on how this goes now,’ he said, but from his tone she guessed there was little argument about it.

Down below, his men were all on their feet, tense. The white giant was marshalling them with curving gestures of his huge claws. He was Scorpion-kinden, she understood, exiled from the Dryclaw Desert south of Helleron. They called him Akta Barik.

‘All ready to go, chief,’ he said. His voice was quiet and he spoke slowly and with great precision, to avoid mumbling through those jutting fangs. ‘Just got word: their man’s on his way.’

‘So what is this?’ she asked.

‘Just a formal way of settling the disputes, so that everyone can see how it falls out.’

‘Sounds a bit above board for your types,’ she said. He threw her an amused look.

‘I didn’t say it was the only way, or even the final way.’ He surveyed his men and addressed them peremptorily. ‘Fighters, do me proud.’ No more speech than that. When the door was opened, there were eight of them went stepping into the street, and neither Sinon nor Barik was amongst them. The street was clear, or at least clear in front of the taverna. A safe distance either side, quite a crowd had gathered.

‘Did Barik say their man?’ Tynisa asked. ‘Just one?’

Sinon nodded. ‘That was the arrangement.’

‘But. . eight on one?’

He gave her a look that was not filled with optimism, and went to the doorway to watch.

A disturbance in the crowd showed people pressing away very hurriedly. Someone was coming who parted them just by word of his approach. Tynisa saw the eight Halfway House combatants tense, spreading out into a loose semi-circle to await his approach.

He stepped clear of the crowd at last: a tall Mantis-kinden, strangely dressed. She saw a green-dyed arming doublet, slit from wrist to elbow for his forearm spines; breeches and boots of darker green; a brooch pin of gold, a sword through a circle, ringing vague bells in her memory. He had no rapier, such as she would expect of a Mantis duellist. Instead there was a metal gauntlet on his right arm with a two-foot blade projecting from the glove.

He walked, very deliberately, until he was at the very centre of the circle his opponents had half-made. He stood with his arms by his sides, feet close together, looking slightly down.

‘A Weaponsmaster,’ she identified at last. ‘I didn’t think there were any left.’

Sinon just grunted, watching, and she still could not understand it: eight men against one, even a Mantis, even a Weaponsmaster, for what that was worth. They had shortswords, maces, offhand daggers; one even had a spear. She looked at them and saw they were not confident. Each was waiting for another to make the first move. The crowd had settled into a rapturous hush.

The Mantis drew his weapon arm up, crooking it across his body with the blade pointed downwards, folded back along his arm. He finally looked up.

One of the men shouted at him, a wordless yell, and they descended upon him at once, six coming at him from three sides, and two bursting into flight to take him from above. In the instant before he was eclipsed from her sight Tynisa did not even see the man react.

But react he did. Even as she lost sight of him two men were already reeling back. In a flash of green he wove between the remainder. The metal claw of his hand danced and spun in the air around him. She saw swords spark off it and the spear lopped in two. In an instant the Mantis had whipped it across the closest swordsman’s face, guiding a mace blow away, and slashed the wielder’s chain mail open, laying his chest raw. The blade lanced upwards to stab into the groin of a Fly-kinden arrowing down with sword and dagger. The short blade moved like a living thing, a flying thing itself. It led and its wielder followed, and he was not touched. His steps were so graceful, so sure, that it was as though he and his enemies had rehearsed this fight for the audience, performed each move a thousand times before this one bloody performance. He walked through the storm of their attacks and they did not so much as tear his clothing.

He put the spines of his arms down past the collarbone of a Beetle-kinden, twice and thrice before the man could react to the first blow. The blade lashed behind him, where the final assailant had been lunging. It cut aside the sword that came for his back, bounded around it, letting the attacker’s own momentum bring him straight onto it.

Seconds. It had been only seconds. Tynisa found that she had her hand clutching white knuckled on her sword hilt.

Eight men lay dead on the cobbles, who had been living and breathing moments before as they filed out of the taverna. The face of the Mantis-kinden was icy, no cruelty there but a bleak detachment. She fell back before he could look in her direction. His was a gaze she did not want to meet.

‘Well, that’s that,’ said Sinon unsympathetically. ‘Now the Gladhanders get the protection business all along Skulkacre.’ He came and sat beside her in the common room, with those others of his men who still walked.

‘Who is he?’ she asked.

‘Tisamon. They call him Tisamon.’ Sinon steepled his fingers. Outside in the street, agents of the Gladhanders were already carting off the bodies for stripping and disposal. ‘Now, dear one, I need you.’

She looked at him levelly. ‘You want me to kill the Mantis?’

She had caught him out. That she could see what she had seen and still make the offer, it was more than he had expected of her. He looked up at Barik and the others. ‘To the door, lads. Nobody else hears this.’

The Scorpion shepherded them away, leaving the lord of the Halfway House and his new recruit alone.

‘Not him, dear one. He’s just a mercenary. I want you to kill his employer. I’ve taken your measure, dear lady. Your face has two advantages over the faces of my regulars, namely that it doesn’t look like a bent boot, and that it won’t be recognized. Now, if you truly want to pay me all you owe, kill the chief of the Gladhanders for me.’

‘I thought this was how you sorted things out.’ She indicated the bloodied cobbles of the street outside.

‘As I said,’ he told her, ‘it’s not the final solution.’

After sundown, the attack picked up where it must have left off the previous night. Instead of being mute witnesses to its after-effects, Che and Salma were there this time: not at the mine site, but Elias, like most mine owners, had another house away from Helleron. Close by the mountains and just a few hundred yards from the rock face and shaft, it was a simple affair compared to his townhouse, just a single-storeyed, flat-roofed lump of a place with a stable block for messengers. It was barely staffed and not intended for visitors, but Elias had turned a servant out of his room to accommodate his new guests. Che felt somewhat guilty about that.

She had been deep in meditation, attempting once more to find the Ancestor Art within her, when she had heard the first explosion. It was a big one, too, for a faint tremor reached her even through the walls. Instantly Che was on her feet and even as she was running for the window she guessed that something had set one of the fuel sinks off. A lot of the mining machinery ran on mineral oil so there was a good sized cache out by the works, and now. .

She caught her breath as she got to the window, because there was a jet of flame a hundred feet high lighting up the walls of the quarry and the foothills of the very mountains themselves. Its faint roaring reached her, eclipsed anything else that might have been audible. There must have been a fearful alarm going on out there. She strained her eyes, looking beyond the dancing column of fire. Sure enough, she could see movement, a great panic of movement. Elias’s guards on the ground would now be swinging their repeating ballista round this way and that. Others would be loosing crossbows. She saw flecks and shimmers in the sky, airborne figures briefly silhouetted before the flames. The Moth-kinden were out in force.

They were barbaric raiders, she reminded herself. They were enemies of progress. As a good Beetle, that was how she should see them. If they had not been so fanatic, they would have been ludicrous, a pack of old mystics lurking in their caves.

She thought of Salma. He was her friend and she respected his opinions. Yet he did not see things as she did.

The door burst open behind her and she whirled round, hand to her sword, half-expecting some mad Moth assassin. Instead it was one of Elias’s two domestic staff.

‘You’re to stay inside the house, miss,’ the man said, as though she had been contemplating jumping out of the window.

‘They’re not going to come here, are they?’ she asked.

‘Nobody knows, miss,’ said the man, plainly himself in the grip of fear. ‘They could do anything.’

She returned her gaze to the window. The flames were lower now, the oil stocks burning dry. She thought she could see the shadowy bulk of one of the repeating ballistas being cranked round, spitting out a man-length bolt every few seconds. There would be guards out there with good crossbows, perhaps even piercers. They had strong armour there and she wondered what weaponry the Moth-kinden possessed to assault such a force with. Spears and stones, perhaps. Bows and arrows.

They had accomplished something already, though. Hundreds of Centrals’ worth of fuel had now gone and the mine works would be set back for days, at least.

And what is the point? The industrialists of Helleron were not going to go away. They would only return with more soldiers, better protection. One day, perhaps, they really would muster a fleet of fliers and airships and attack the Moths at their very homes, if that was the only way to stop their raiding.

And would that be the answer? She had the uncomfortable feeling that she had been assigned a role in this conflict without ever being asked. There had been a few Moth-kinden at the College, she recalled: strange reserved creatures like Doctor Nicrephos. She had not spoken to any of them but she knew the history. Before the revolution the Moth-kinden had held most of the Lowlands in chains. With the Mantids acting as their strong right hand, they had terrorized the other races with their superstition and charlatanry, or so the history books now claimed. Then the revolution had come: the rise of the Apt, the fall of the old ways before the forge-fires of innovation. It had all started in Collegium, which had been called Pathis when the Moths ruled. The revolt had then burned its way to every corner of the Lowlands, leaving only a few Moth haunts and Mantis holds untouched.

Surely they can see progress.

She thought of the way Salma had reacted to the factories, the mine workings, how it had struck him almost like an illness. He had kept his smile hoisted for all to see, but she knew the sight had appalled him. After all, they were not enlightened people in his Commonweal. They still thought magic existed. No factories, no artificers, no machines.

And, of course, to the east the Wasp-kinden were stoking their own furnaces to turn out weapons of war. Those they had not bought from the clever smiths of Helleron, that is.

After such thoughts she could not watch any longer, and went to join Salma in the main room of the house. Elias had locked himself in his study, so as best they could they played a few hands of cards with the trembling servants, everyone endeavouring to ignore the continuing sounds from outside. Even when the commotion was right at the outer walls, with soldiers running past, the harsh clack of crossbows loosing, they shuttered the windows and pretended not to hear.

In the morning it was all over. She awoke and spent a moment regarding Salma, in the next bed, still smiling slightly even in sleep. She rose, dressed, and went into the dining room to meditate again.

And she then remembered the previous night, sleep falling from her fast like a veil. Opening the shutters showed that a plume of smoke still twisted from the mine workings.

She wondered how many had died. Then she wondered how many had died on both sides. The thought shocked her. At the College she had learnt that the Moth-kinden, for all the faults laid at their door, were not a warlike race, quite the reverse.

There were evils everywhere in the world, Che supposed, and, once she had admitted that, she would have to allow that her own race was responsible for some of them.

There was a well out in the house’s yard, between it and the stables. Taking up her sword for good measure, she wandered outside and drew a bucket of water up, feeling the chill of morning on her. The ground was flecked with ash, and she wondered what else had burned in the night. Perhaps they had set fire to the winch or the smelting shed? It was all like prodding some great beast with a stick, one of the big hauling beetles or something. You would annoy it and annoy it, and sooner or later it would turn round and you would discover it was far, far stronger than you had ever imagined. The Moth-kinden could not know what they were inviting down on them.

There was a squad of guards, five of them, poking about the perimeter of the yard, perhaps totalling up all the damage done during the night. They paused expectantly to watch her, and her original idea of washing there, in plain view, became suddenly less attractive.

She gave them a hard stare and an imperious gesture, for she was the cousin of their employer, after all. Reluctantly they went about their business, and for good measure she carried the bucket of water into the stables for her ablutions. A pair of messengers’ horses would make more bearable spectators.

She closed the stable door behind her and heard a soft whisper of sound from deeper within. Steel on leather, a blade being unsheathed. Her reaction, without thought, found her dropping the bucket and dragging her own sword half out.

There was a man in the shadows at the far end of the stables. He was slight, grey-skinned, a Moth she realized, and even in the gloom she saw the glint of a knife.