Empire in Black and Gold

Twenty-two

It was as though a hand, chill as ice, had placed its fingers on her forehead, and Che awoke, or tried to wake. Something caught her, like a spider’s web, halfway between sleep’s abyss and the conscious heights of the waking world.

A voice was speaking to her. Cheerwell! A voice she should know from somewhere, and yet supported by a vast chorus of whispers, and all of them also saying her name.

‘What. . what is it? Who. .?’ She knew she did not speak, and yet her words went out.

Listen to me. You must hear me. And again that half-familiar tone that she could not place.

‘I hear you.’

Do not fear, Cheerwell, for I am coming for you, to repay what is owed. I am coming to free you.

‘I don’t understand. .’ She felt as though she was on some rushing, surging wave, being whisked away beyond her own control. She had no sense of place or time. The darkness was thick and absolute.

You must tell me where you are, Cheerwell, said the voice — or voices — to her. Where are you? Let me find you.

And at last the concept came to her and she trawled her mind, feeling even as she did that she was rising towards the waking world where things like this could not be.

‘Myna. Going to Myna.’

And, even as she spoke, she felt a withdrawing, and she was suddenly rushing on towards wakefulness, pelting pell-mell for it, and at the last moment the owner of that voice came to her.

Achaeos!

‘Achaeos!’ And she woke with her own voice and his name ringing in her ears.

She opened her eyes on the storage bay that was their cell. Salma was sitting cross-legged across from her and his eyes were open also, as though just this moment he had been snatched from sleep. The Butterfly, Grief in Chains, lay on her side, but she too had pushed herself up onto one elbow, her white eyes wide. ‘Night brother. .’ she said quietly.

‘Che, are you all right?’ Salma asked.

‘I don’t know.’ Che found she was panting heavily, as though she had been running. ‘What just happened?’

‘There was something here,’ Salma said definitely.

‘Something. . what? Why did she. .?’ She turned to the Butterfly. ‘Why did you say what you just said.’

Grief in Chains just stared at her.

‘I felt. . Salma, tell me!’ Che pleaded.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t know enough, and you wouldn’t believe me anyway.’

‘Are you going to tell me it was. . It was just a dream, that’s all.’

Salma’s habitual smile found his face at last. ‘Of course.’

Grief in Chains sat up fully. ‘You were touched,’ she said. ‘Darkness touched you.’ She seemed visibly upset. She had spoken very little during the previous day’s journeying, but when Salma reached a hand out to her she had clung to it.

‘It was just a. . a dream,’ Che insisted. A bad dream or a good one? she asked herself, and received no answer.

Abruptly someone banged on the hatch. ‘You keep it quiet down in there!’ barked one of the two soldiers Thalric had brought along. ‘You don’t want to wake the captain up, that’s for sure.’

Che closed her mouth and then frowned. ‘Wake? It’s. . it’s already day. .’

‘Day?’ Salma asked her, puzzled.

‘It’s light.’

‘Che, it’s dark.’

She goggled at him. She could see him so clearly. She could see Grief clearly, and also the bare walls of their prison. The light was strange, though. It was like strong moonlight, leached of colour. Even Grief’s ever-changing skin and hair were just a motley of greys to her.

Salma pointed upwards. Lining two walls were a row of slits, and when she had bedded down for the night there had been a faint light there still, as the dusk passed into darkness.

The light was not coming from there, for they were no brighter than the rest of the room. The strange light was not coming from anywhere.

‘Salma,’ she said slowly. ‘I think I’ve found the Art — the Ancestor Art. Or else it’s found me. Salma, how did you first know that you could. .?’

‘I could jump into the air and stay there,’ he said blandly, but she was too excited to care about his sarcasm, because she could see clearly and it was still night. This was a Beetle Art, she knew, though not a common one, and why should it not finally manifest in this closed box of a place?

And yet there were others who could see in the dark from their very births, needing no Art for it, who were truly creatures of darkness and the night. She had met one recently and his blood had been on her hands.

Night brother, the Butterfly had said, and she had dreamt the voice of Achaeos, remembered somehow from that strange, brief encounter.

She leant back against the wall and discovered that there was a patina of frost slowly melting across it. Yet the night outside had been overcast, not chill at all.

They crept back towards the camp before dawn, Tisamon padding silently in front, and Tynisa trailing behind. For her it had been an unreal night. Tisamon was a hard man to keep up with, and yet she had shadowed him all the way to Asta. Together they had passed through the ring of sentries, dodging the great lamp, the beam of which passed sometimes across the temporary streets of the muster town. All the while there had been not one word spoken between them. Tisamon had, at first, barely seemed to know that she was there, but as the night had progressed, something had grown between them, some wordless commonality. His stealthy poise and tread had slowly changed to include her in his progress. Where he had once looked both ways, silent in the shadows of a storehouse or barracks, now he would look left while she looked right. He had eased into a trust of her, a confidence that she was up to the task, and all still without ever acknowledging her. Then had come the slave pits, and he had stepped back and kept watch while she, who knew the pair, had sought out Che and Salma.

The two hunters had developed an understanding, it seemed, and, as they had come back through the forest fringe, perhaps more than that. The darkness within the forest was as dense as midnight, not the near-dawn they had left outside, but she could still see enough in the half-light to make out the trees.

And more than the trees. She stopped suddenly, and Tisamon halted at the same instant, looking straight at her.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you see them too, don’t you?’

She was not sure whether she really had until he said it, but there were figures there, amid the trees. Not close, not moving, and in the gloom even her eyes fought to distinguish their outlines. Then they became clearer, or perhaps closer, and she stopped trying to make them out. They were human, or might have been. They had the poise and stance of Mantis-kinden and yet, as she had glimpsed them, they seemed to be formed like praying mantids, with gleaming chitin and glittering eyes, and yet again there was gnarled wood and thorns worked into them.

Tynisa stopped then and turned her eyes away. ‘I do not. . I cannot be seeing this.’ A Collegium-raised girl, from a world of rationality and science, for all that she understood none of it.

‘Your blood says otherwise,’ was Tisamon’s quiet reply, before they moved on in silence once more.

It took a while of tracking to locate Stenwold’s new campsite. When they stepped into sight the Beetle looked up at them and she saw the brief hope dashed in his face.

‘Any sign?’ he asked quietly.

Tisamon shook his head and went to sit by the dying fire.

‘They keep their prisoners in pits there, and we looked in every one,’ Tynisa explained. ‘No sign. They could have been in one of the buildings. There was no way of knowing.’

She went to sit next to Tisamon, but he looked up at her with a face utterly devoid of invitation, only his usual cold mask with which he confronted the world, the face of a man expecting a fight. Their shared silent communion of the night was gone, and in his eyes there was no admission that it had ever existed. Mere minutes before they had been moving as one between the trees. Now his eyes were unwriting it all, remaking each memory in his own image. She felt a bitter anger well up in her.

What was all that about, then? What did we share earlier, and where did we leave it? But she could voice no questions, and he would give no answers. Her fists clenched and unclenched and, not for the first time, she wished that she could talk to Che right now. Che was the only person she could unburden herself to.

All the more reason to rescue her.

She rose and went to sit beside Stenwold instead.

‘Why did you move the camp?’ Tisamon asked. ‘Not that it was difficult to find.’

‘We had some nocturnal visitors.’ Stenwold shook his head heavily. ‘A patrol chased us into the woods.’ He saw Tisamon flinch and he frowned. ‘They’re just woods, Tisamon. Trees. You get them all over.’

‘Are they indeed?’ The Mantis regarded him. ‘And so you two just crept into the Darakyon and crept out again?’

Stenwold shared an unhappy glance with Totho. ‘Well. . you can imagine me and the boy here at night in the middle of a forest. .’ A quick look at Tisamon showed the Mantis was not satisfied with that. ‘What can I say?’

‘I don’t know. What can you say?’

‘It was dark. There were sounds. Woods at night are. . not my favourite place,’ Stenwold said defensively. There were sounds. Oh there were sounds all right. He wondered if the last dregs of the panic showed again on his face, in that moment: he and Totho blundering in circles, trying to retrace their path. There had been no path. Behind them had been only briars, until they had found a pitch-black clearing by feeling with their hands, a clearing from which there was no way out at all. They had gone from tree to gnarled tree, lancing their gloves on thorns, leaving drops of their blood smeared on the bark, and they had gone around and around in the darkness until Totho had tried to light a lantern, and to the pits with the Wasps. Stenwold remembered that moment most of all, for the steel lighter would not catch, just sparks and sparks that illuminated nothing but themselves, and in the silence afterwards they had heard an almost musical sound, from all around and far away, that could have been the forest breathing.

‘We had. . all sorts of games running through the woods at night,’ Stenwold finished weakly, and heard Tisamon’s almost triumphant snort.

‘Where is the Moth?’ the Mantis asked.

‘Achaeos?’ Stenwold looked at his hands. ‘He wasn’t with us. I can’t imagine the Wasps caught him. He can fly and see in the dark, after all. Still, if he’s around, he’s still keeping his distance. He never did want to go into the forest.’

Stenwold and Totho had sat down to wait for dawn, while the Darakyon creaked and rasped about them, lightless and bitterly cold. The time they had spent there, unable to sleep, nerves constantly fraying at each groan and snap, had seemed too long to possibly fit inside only one night.

Then it had come to them. They had heard it, the slow, careful approach of something very large. There had been the rattle of Totho trying to load his crossbow blind, and Stenwold had taken up his sword, hopeless in the darkness. I do not believe in Tisamon’s folk tales, he had told himself, but traitor logic had grinned at him and said, Why think of ghosts at all? There are many things belonging to the material world that can kill a man. In his mind’s eye he had envisaged that stealthy approach as a mantis, an insect ten feet long with huge night-seeing eyes and neatly folded killing arms. He had held out his sword invisibly before him, hearing Totho’s fumbling grow increasingly desperate and hearing the thing, whatever it was, grow closer.

They had run, the pair of them. In the same moment, as if by agreement, they had bolted, and the clearing was suddenly permeable again. They had bolted through briars and needling thorns and not stopped, and they had run until, without warning, there were no trees around them and they were half a mile east of their original camp. They had then spent the scant time before dawn finding the automotive again.

‘It’s just a wood,’ he said, voice sounding hollow to his own ears. ‘In the dark, the imagination will always run riot. We were in no real danger, two armed men. It’s Achaeos I’m worried about.’

‘He might just have absconded,’ Totho said darkly. ‘This isn’t his fight.’

‘When he comes back. .’ Stenwold said, and paused. ‘When he comes back, because if he doesn’t we may have to make a different choice, we have to make a decision. We don’t know whether Che and Salma are being held at Asta, or whether Achaeos now is, if things have gone really badly, or whether they’ve already gone east, deeper into the Empire. If they’re being kept apart from other prisoners, well, that could prove good or bad.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Totho.

‘I mean that it probably suggests they’ve been set aside for questioning,’ said Stenwold. ‘I’m sorry. It could just mean they’re being given special treatment, held more securely, I don’t know, but. . Tisamon and I know how the Wasps work.’

‘Maybe. . I should go in tomorrow night,’ said Totho reluctantly. ‘I mean, I’m not so. . with the creeping around, but I’ve got the tools to force a lock.’

Stenwold grimaced. ‘It may even come to that.’

And a new voice asked, ‘Where or what is Myna?’

Achaeos had returned. He looked dead on his feet, his grey skin gone deathly pale, eyes narrowed down to white slits.

‘Where in the name of reason have you been all night?’ Stenwold demanded of him.

Achaeos regarded him coldly. ‘Myna,’ he said. ‘Does this name mean anything to you?’

‘It does.’ Tisamon stood, his metal claw unfolding from the line of his arm.

‘She is going to Myna,’ the Moth said. ‘They are not in the town down there.’

‘How did you find this out?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘Old ways.’ Achaeos shrugged. ‘Ways you wouldn’t understand.’

Tisamon and Stenwold exchanged looks in which their mutual memory of Myna was unearthed, and neither of them looked happy with it.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Totho said. ‘He can’t know that.’

‘They are gone to Myna,’ Achaeos insisted stubbornly.

‘He could have. . crept into Asta,’ Tynisa said slowly, ‘and overheard. But you didn’t, did you?’

‘There are ways,’ said Tisamon. ‘Masters of the Grey,’ he added.

‘Servants of the Green,’ Achaeos completed, as if by rote. ‘Yes, there are ways.’ If only you knew what I have risked, to take those ways. ‘So, Mantis, you at least believe me.’

There was a very swift movement that Achaeos could not follow, and a moment later the thin, cold edge of Tisamon’s blade was pressing against his neck. He held very still, nearly swallowing his heart inside, but outside he managed to cling to his customary aloofness.

‘I am no fool, nor am I quick to trust,’ Tisamon told him. ‘There are ways, yes, and one of them is to be in the pay of our enemies. Moths are subtle. It would not surprise me to find you playing such a game. Especially a game that led to Myna. What better place to lure Stenwold, in order to catch him?’

‘I speak only what I have seen, Servant of the Green. If you know my kinden so well, you should know not to bandy threats against me,’ Achaeos said defiantly, but the blade twitched against his skin, the faintest prick of blood welling.

‘Don’t think that you can frighten me,’ warned Tisamon, although to Stenwold’s ear, who had known him so long, there was a slight uncertainty to his voice.

‘I was not an assassin the last time you drew on me,’ said Achaeos, ‘and I am not a spy now. I could tell you one thing more that should convince you, but it is for your ears alone.’

Without moving his blade from its resting place, Tisamon leant close suspiciously. As he heard the Moth’s whispered sentence, the others saw him flinch from it. At once the blade was clear of the Moth’s neck, folding back along its owner’s arm.

‘He’s telling the truth,’ the Mantis announced.

‘Just from a bit of mystic posturing?’ Totho demanded. ‘Listen, Che could be in one of those buildings right now. They could be about to actually torture her. And now we’re supposed to. . just go away to some whole other city, all because of some dream you had or something? Stenwold, you’re not going to listen to this rubbish, surely?’

To his alarm Stenwold was not looking dismissive, only troubled. ‘There is more in the world than we know,’ he said quietly. ‘I have been a long time trying to stave off that conclusion, but in the end I have had to admit there are things I have seen that I cannot account for. Tisamon, you truly believe this?’

A short nod was the Mantis’s only response.

‘Tynisa?’

She gave Tisamon a narrow look. ‘I’m with Totho on this. We should at least take another turn around Asta first.’

‘Well, in Collegium we abide by the vote, and it looks as though I get the deciding one,’ said Stenwold. ‘I’m out of my depth here, with this talk of arcana, but logic tells me that Asta is a staging post, a muster ground. If you had important prisoners, maybe you would indeed move them to the nearest proper city. Which is Myna — of unhappy memory. Tisamon. .’ Stenwold hesitated, biting his lip.

‘Speak,’ Tisamon said.

‘I. . find it difficult to hold to what I cannot understand.’

‘You always did.’

‘But I never had so much riding on a decision before. What did he say to you, the Moth? What did he say to convince you?’ He glanced at Achaeos, who was impassive as always.

‘I cannot think that it would help you to know.’

‘Please tell me,’ asked Stenwold, and the Mantis shrugged.

‘He said that those who told him they had gone to Myna also said that they stayed their hands from us because of the badge that I bear.’ He touched it for a moment, the gold circle-and-sword pin of the Weapons-masters. ‘And I earned this, Stenwold. I earned it in blood and fire.’

For a long time Stenwold stared at him, before transferring his gaze to the others. Totho still looked rebellious but something in Tynisa’s face, some recent experience, had changed her mind. He gave a great sigh. ‘We’ll go to Myna.’ He had never thought that he would see Myna again, nor had he wished to.

It was a jumbled vision they had of it, landing at an airfield overflown by yellow and black flags. The cumbersome heliopter shuddered and groaned at the last, settling too fast and creaking with the effort, despite the repairs that Aagen had grounded it for last night.

The savagery of daylight, after the dimness of their holding cell, left the two of them staggering and blinking. Salma could not shield his eyes and so Che put her hands over them for him, knowing how much more sensitive they were than hers. Grief in Chains did not flinch or blink but gazed straight at the sun with her all-white eyes and glowed with it, drinking it in. She had paled and pined in the last day, but now she shone as though she had a piece of the sun inside her, and for a second the Wasp soldiers stepped back, and every head on the airfield turned to stare.

Then Thalric was hustling them, ordering the soldiers to take them in hand. They were rough with her and with Salma, but Grief they escorted with something more uncertain. She was beautiful, Che had to admit; she was perfect. Colours flowed across her skin like silk.

Che received only a confused, blurring impression of Myna. First the airstrip, where most of the traffic was military; then onto narrow streets and being hauled, tripping, down runs of little steps; brief glimpses of the citizens, men and women of a bluish-grey cast of skin, not quite Beetle-kinden, not quite Ant — another new race for her — who went about their daily lot with heads downcast. There were plenty of Wasps, too: most were soldiers, and others not in armour were probably still soldiers, judging from what Thalric had said about his people. Other kinden wore the imperial colours: plenty of Fly-kinden running errands, or sometimes watching from a high vantage point, with a bow and quiver on their backs. There were more, too: lean, long men and women resembling the musician who had been a slave with them in Brutan’s convoy. These went barefoot but wore yellow shirts and black breeches, like some poor imitation of their Wasp masters, and they carried staves and odd, two-pronged daggers. From the brief glimpse she had, they looked like guards, city watch.

But of course, she realized, as the shadow of a great wall fell across her, it would be considered menial for Wasps to police their subjects, unless there is some great need for it. These strange sentries must be drafted in from some other imperial conquest.

And then she looked up at the edifice that loomed above them, and she choked, because it was ugly beyond belief. All around it the buildings of Myna conformed to a low and careful style, flat-roofed and spartan like Ant-city designs. This thing was so utterly alien here that it must have been Wasp architecture: a great tiered monstrosity that looked so out of place it might have been dropped from the sky. There was a broad flight of steps at the fore that narrowed upwards to a door that, even as they approached, still looked tastelessly oversized. They could have driven a fair-sized automotive through it, if they could only have got it up the steps. The door was flanked by two statues, which matched neither each other, the building nor the city. One of them was something abstract, the work of some madman or genius who had made the stone flow like water under his hands. The other showed a warrior in strange armour, and Salma missed a step when he saw it and almost fell backwards. From that reaction Che realized it must be from his own people, war loot from the recent campaign.

Brief glimpses of the interior, where shafts of sunlight fell like spears, and there was a gallery hall like a museum that valued its exhibits by the amount of gilt they sported rather than their meaning, and then they were descending underground again. Grief was taken off one way by Aagen, with a final backwards glance at Salma, then Che’s chin was seized, her head tilted painfully back to look up into Thalric’s face.

‘I have business,’ the Wasp told her, ‘and when I am done we have a conversation to finish, so think on it.’

She was still thinking on it when the cell door closed behind her.

On the other side, the free side, of her cell door, Thalric took a moment to consider his options. The Rekef Inlander had sent him to Myna to have a word with his old friend Ulther. Myna was one of the cities supplying the war against the Lowlands, the war that Thalric had been preparing for a long time, and apparently it was not pulling its weight. Was it really due to Ulther being greedy and corrupt? It only mattered that the Rekef thought it so. They did not trust Ulther, which meant that neither should Thalric.

On their way to the governor’s palace he had been carefully watching the crowd. Still, he had nearly missed it, for Fly-kinden got everywhere, after all. That was why the Rekef made use of them. Because he had been watching, he had seen te Berro, watching him in return. The Rekef had sent Thalric, but they did not trust him either. There was clearly a choice coming up in the near future which he was loath to make.

Thalric liked life simple, which many would think was a strange attitude for a spymaster. The simplicity he craved was to know exactly what side he was on. This was why he had thrown himself into the Rekef Outlander so diligently. The Empire was right and the quarrelsome, disorganized and barbaric foreigners were wrong. Once you had that simple truth in your head, so many problems just melted away.

But the problems had just been waiting for their moment, he now saw.

Ulther and he, they went way back. Thalric had been aged fifteen at Myna, the most junior of junior officers. They had given him a squad of ten men and put him near the front when the gates fell. He had acquitted himself adequately.

There had been a colonel commanding the assault. At this remove Thalric found he couldn’t remember the man’s name. He had died, anyway. The Soldier Beetle-kinden of Myna hadn’t done it. Some roving assassin with an anti-Empire brief had played that role. Rumour suggested it had been a Commonweal plot. Whatever the reason, Major Ulther had taken charge of the street-to-street fighting. The Mynans weren’t as tricky as Ant-kinden, no mindlinks here to coordinate perfect attacks and defences, but every one of the bastards had been out fighting, even the children. It had been dealt with in the usual way — cause enough destruction and hold a knife to the leaders’ throats. Ulther had caused the destruction and held the knife, and in Thalric’s view he had done it brilliantly, so Myna had been taken in half the time, with half the loss of life.

And then of course the street-to-street patrols, rooting out the resistance and hunting down the ringleaders, had been the very action to test the young Thalric, so that by the time the city was firmly in Empire hands he had been made a full lieutenant and the envy of his peers. Ulther had then taken him into his confidence, his inner circle, so Thalric had learned a great deal about the Empire and how it worked.

Ulther had put forward his name to the Rekef, or so he always believed. The irony was not lost on Thalric. He could cling to the hope, he supposed, that the rumours were misplaced and that Ulther remained a pillar of imperial loyalty, but what were the chances of that?

A chill went through him. Even if Ulther had not put a foot wrong in seventeen years, if Thalric went back to the Rekef with that report what would they do? What would they think of him? Would they have sent him at all if they had not wanted a foregone conclusion? Who exactly was under the lens here, anyway?

Too many questions and too little solid ground. He went in search of Aagen and found him supervising the loading of his flier.

‘Lieutenant Aagen.’

Aagen threw him a preoccupied salute, while leafing through a manifest.

‘Lieutenant, I want you to arrange for another pilot to take this machine back to Asta.’

‘Thalric?’ Aagen turned quickly enough at that. ‘I mean, sir?’

‘I’m going to require your services here. Consider yourself deputized, Aagen,’ Thalric continued.

‘But-’

Thalric put a hand on his shoulder, guiding him to one side. ‘Listen, Aagen, I’ve known you for a long time. .’

‘Yes?’

‘I need someone here I can trust.’

Aagen glanced over his shoulder at the local soldiers supervising the loading. ‘But the governor-’

‘Not the governor or his men, understand?’

The artificer’s face fell. ‘Oh spit, like that, is it? Listen, I’m Engineering Corps. I’m not one of your sneaks.’

Thalric smiled. ‘Who knows, Lieutenant, maybe you’ll be promoted. By the way, you’ve done some interrogation work, haven’t you, as an artificer?’

Aagen nodded, though his expression showed he was not happy about admitting it.

‘You might want to revise your notes then,’ Thalric said grimly. ‘I may require your services.’

They were glad of the automotive in the end, with the exception of Achaeos, who would have happily abandoned it. The roads had become impossible for between Myna and Asta there was a constant traffic of black and gold. However the stilt-legged machine that Scuto had found for them was more than capable of making its stuttering way cross-country, with Totho and Stenwold winding the clockwork twice a day.

Are we inside the Empire now? When did we cross the border? But it was a false premise, of course. Stenwold knew that maps took boundaries that shifted like water and tried to set them in stone. The borders were where the Empire wished them to be, unless somebody took a sufficient stand.

And will they finally take a stand? When I go to the Assembly and tell them that the little stopover of Asta is now a nest of soldiers? Or will they just shut their ears again and throw me out?

The land lying east of the Darakyon was rugged, home to a few families of goat herders or beetle drovers. Off the road itself there was no imperial stamp to be seen. What could they do to further oppress this poverty? On one occasion, Stenwold and the others shared a fire with some of the locals: quiet, sullen men with blue-grey Mynan skin. There were many halfbreeds amongst them, mixing blood of Beetle-kinden or of Wasp. They seemed inheritors of an unhappiness that no shifting of political boundaries would change, but they asked no questions and they had fresh meat. This made them more than tolerable fireside companions.

When the imperial patrol did at last find them, they were prepared. Tisamon, Tynisa and the Moth had melted away, ready with sword and claw if matters turned difficult. Stenwold and Totho had meanwhile waited patiently as a half-dozen of the Light Airborne fell to earth around them.

This was when Stenwold had been sure that they were now inside the Empire. If they had been beyond its borders then there would have been blood, and in the confusion of ambush it would have been blood on both sides, likely as not, but clearly these men were bored, sent out from some convoy just to make work for them in conquered territory. They saw only a tramp artificer and his apprentice riding on their antiquated machine, the two of them looking for skilled work in Myna. Was there much work in Myna, Stenwold asked? The Wasp sergeant had shrugged, then made enough loose threats to justify a small offering of imperial coin. A moment later the patrol was airborne again, and receding into the distance.

‘Why didn’t they arrest us?’ Totho had demanded.

‘Arrest who? An old artificer and his boy?’

‘But you’re Stenwold Maker. They must know-’

‘Know what? Who’s Stenwold Maker? I doubt every imperial soldier carries a picture of me in his pocket, Totho. Besides, they wouldn’t know we’re coming, because. .’ He had turned to see Achaeos and the rest now approaching, the Moth’s face invisible within his cowl. ‘Because there is no way that we ourselves could have known,’ Stenwold had finished awkwardly.

They halted the wheezing automotive within sight of Myna itself, counting on sufficient distance to hide them. Myna was built on a hillside with the airfield at its highest point, as Stenwold and Tisamon had good cause to remember, so they made their vantage point on another hill, looking across a lower rise to the city.

Stenwold had his telescope out from his pack, the dust of years brushed off it only recently, and was now squinting through it at their objective keenly.

‘The walls are refortified. Looks like there’s less artillery though. I suppose they’re not so much worried about an actual siege as internal trouble. The Wasp stripes are flying from the towers. .’ he carefully moved his point of view across the city, or as much as he could see of it, ‘and someone’s built the world’s biggest wart of a building where the old Consensus used to stand. Demonstration of power, I suppose. And the airfield looks busy, so I’d guess this is a major stopover on the road to Asta and the Lowlands.’ He took the device from his eye and carefully folded it away. ‘This is going to be difficult.’

‘It always was,’ Tisamon confirmed, and the two of them looked at their younger companions. A Spider, a Moth and a half-caste artificer — not the most inconspicuous of travelling companions.

‘I’ll get inside-’ the Mantis started, but Stenwold cut him off.

‘Not this time. This one’s mine.’

‘Stenwold,’ Tisamon said reasonably, ‘you’ve absolutely no gift for creeping about.’

‘You forget my great advantage though. I’m Beetle-kinden and my race live all over the Empire. A tramp artificer can get work anywhere there are machines.’

‘They’ll be looking out for you,’ Tynisa warned him.

‘Probably,’ Stenwold agreed, ‘but in a city that sees such a lot of traffic, it’s a job and a half to spot one man, and because they’re expecting either one man or a whole group, I’ll take Totho along with me as my apprentice. A tinker and prentice should be inconspicuous enough, all right, Totho?’

The young artificer swallowed nervously, but nodded.

‘And what will you do once you’re inside?’ Tisamon asked.

‘Start dropping names,’ Stenwold said. ‘There must be someone left that we used to know, and if there’s any kind of resistance movement, they’ll undoubtedly be involved.’

‘Be very careful,’ Tisamon warned him. ‘You don’t know for sure that they’ll welcome you with open arms.’

‘They’ve no reason to, but I don’t see any other choice. We can’t exactly break into the prisons of Myna on our own. When I’ve made contact there, we’ll sort out the best way of getting you three in. If there’s no easy way, then at least Totho and I — who, as you say, aren’t built for the shadow stuff — will be inside the city. After that, you three can make your own way. Agreed?’

‘And meet you where? I don’t want the same mess as in Helleron,’ Tynisa said. ‘Especially in a city riddled with Wasps.’

‘There are two plazas in Myna, or at least there were. At the east plaza there used to be a merchant exchange run by an old Scorpion-kinden named Hokiak. He might even run it still.’

Tisamon remembered. ‘That was a low place.’

‘I hope it still is,’ Stenwold said. ‘Hokiak was a black marketeer before the Wasps moved in, and if we’re lucky he or his successor still is. That sort of trade is useful to all sort of malcontents and revolutionaries, so it’s a good place to start looking. I’ll leave word there for you, if I can.’