Empire in Black and Gold

Twenty-five

They had both ankles pinned down now, and one wrist, and she turned frantically to the man tugging at the buckle. She knew him: he was the man they had come to Myna with, the one Thalric had spoken to. Desperation brought his name to her, when nothing else could.

‘Aagen! You’re Aagen, aren’t you?’ She tried to keep her voice steady, instead hearing the ragged mess she made of it. He glanced at her briefly and pulled the strap tight.

‘Thalric said you were an. . an artificer? Is that right? You’re not a soldier? Please listen to me. I’m an artificer. I studied mechanics. Please. .’ She yanked at the strap but there was no give in it.

He was now giving her a pitying look. ‘Of course I’m an artificer,’ he said, and she went cold all over. Of course he was an artificer: for the Wasps, this was an artificer’s job — the same as repairing an automotive or making a pump, and no more or less worth the attention of a trained professional.

‘You’re going to. . to torture me?’

He looked unhappy about it, but it was too small a concession to common humanity to do her any good. He was a Wasp of the Empire, and he was going to do it anyway, unhappy or not.

‘Good work, Aagen,’ said that hateful voice, as Thalric strode in and admired the handiwork. ‘I told you it would all come back to you.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Oh cheer up.’ Thalric seemed to have abandoned his angst of the previous night. Now he was all energy. ‘You two can leave us,’ he told the attendant soldiers. ‘This is for our ears only.’

They looked a little put out at that. Perhaps they had been looking forward to the excruciation of a Beetle girl. Still, Thalric watched them stonily until they left, and then bolted the door behind them.

‘Thalric,’ Che’s voice was a little hoarse from the screaming, ‘you don’t have to do this.’

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘Thalric, please,’ she said. She could feel tears springing to her eyes. Aagen was — she shuddered — laying out a medical kit beside her, unrolling the pocketed strip of cloth to reveal the gleaming points of the probes and the clips and the scalpels. ‘Please don’t do this. You’re a. . an intelligent man, a civilized man.’

Thalric was smiling at her now, in a terribly derisive way. ‘Has all that spirit dissipated through the drain in your cell, Miss Maker? What a loss that will be to humanity.’

‘Captain Thalric, this is. . beneath you,’ she told him, but still her voice quavered, despite her best efforts.

‘So I shouldn’t use this expedience to get what I want from you?’

‘No. . No. .’

‘So you’re ready to talk?’

‘I. .’ She swallowed. ‘Yes. Yes I’m ready.’

‘It’s a shame then that I’m no longer ready to listen,’ he told her. His eyes, above that smile, were ice. ‘Fire up your machine, Aagen.’

The artificer hesitated, just for a second, and for Che that meant a second more of freedom from pain and she could have blessed him for it. Then he strode across the room and started pulling levers. Somewhere below them there was a boiler room, where a head of steam had been got up some time before. The metal arms above her shuddered into life almost immediately with a great hiss and a rattle.

‘Louder!’ called Thalric. ‘I want to hear it roar!’

Aagen glanced at him wildly but did as he was bid, raising the pressure until Che would have had trouble answering any questions above it. Maybe they just wanted to make her scream.

But that wasn’t Thalric’s way. She narrowed her eyes, watching him. He was oblivious to her, now beckoning Aagen over.

‘The time has come,’ she heard him say, ‘when I need your services, Aagen.’

The artificer glanced at their victim, but Thalric shook his head impatiently. ‘Not as a professional but as a loyal citizen of the Empire.’

Aagen liked that even less, from his expression, but Thalric was beckoning him over to the far end of the room, and he came when called. With the rumble of the steam engine and the ringing of the suspended tool-arms filling the room, Thalric bent close to him and spoke carefully and clearly. There were patches that Che could hear, but patches only. It was enough to set her mind racing even so.

‘I want you to find a place. .’ she made out, followed by, ‘. . must know. Then go to the. . waiting for you. . in chains. .’ By now she was craning sideways, trying to squeeze every word she could from Thalric’s murmuring.

‘. . no one, not even me. . let you know, if I can. . not then. . self scarce.’

She realized that even if there was someone listening at the door, or even from behind some false panel in the walls, they would hear none of it. To the outside world it would seem that Thalric had a prisoner in the torture room, and the machines themselves were drowning out the sounds of whatever evils he was enacting.

Thalric was obviously asking for some confirmation, and Aagen was nodding, unhappy still, voicing some objection that Che could not catch at all.

Thalric grinned wickedly. ‘. . say I share the attraction. . never know. .’ He clapped Aagen on the shoulder, the same comradely gesture he had made before.

Finally, something Che heard all of, for all the good it did her. ‘Now dispatch it straight,’ Thalric instructed, and Aagen nodded, not a military salute but the nod of a friend with an errand to fulfil. Then he unbolted the door and left her alone with Thalric.

The Wasp captain wandered over to the steam engine and studied the levers. Che understood he was about to release the steam from the system and stop the noise, and that he was not entirely sure how to go about it. She saw the tool heads above her, shivering with steam-driven power, imagined a mechanized arm of one holding the drills dropping suddenly, unfolding like the sting of a scorpion, flicking its steel tip out into her. .‘Thalric!’ she yelled desperately. ‘Thalric!’

He glanced over at her.

‘The one at the end! The red band!’

His lips twitched, and for a moment she thought he was not going to comply at all, but then he pulled the lever up, and she heard the steam venting from the system somewhere above.

The roar of the machine died away and soon the quiet in the small room was deafening.

His footsteps, as he came over to the bench, sounded like thunderclaps. For a long time, far longer than she liked, he stared down at her wordlessly, though his expression spoke volumes. He was perhaps considering just how much at his mercy, his personal mercy, she was.

In the face of that look, which disturbed her more than she could tell, she had to speak up, if only to disrupt the moody train of his thoughts.

‘So you’re sending her away?’

He raised an eyebrow at her.

‘Grief in Chains,’ she continued, and his expression became briefly irritated. Quickly hidden again, but she saw it there nonetheless.

‘You have keen ears, Miss Maker,’ he told her dryly.

‘I’m more used to having machines around me than you think, perhaps.’

He considered her again, but at least it was now an assessing look and not something darker. ‘I shall have to remember that when next torturing Beetles,’ he said.

‘You trust Aagen a lot, don’t you?’ she said, and for a fragile second there was a genuine smile on his face. Erased, again, but visible, for that brief second, on a face which surely could not belong to that fiend Thalric, agent of the Empire.

‘We go back many years, Aagen and I, so I can trust him with a great deal.’

‘Even with Grief in Chains?’ She could not entirely keep the bitterness out of her voice as she said it. ‘She seems to have an effect on men.’

‘I trust him even with her. He is a good servant of the Empire.’

‘I don’t understand you, Thalric.’ She was still very much at his mercy, but her curiosity overtook her.

‘I am not here to be understood,’ he snapped, but she persisted.

‘You can’t just live for an Empire. Everybody must live for himself as well. Your man Aagen’s not just a good servant of the Empire. He’s a friend of yours.’

‘Enough,’ he said, ‘or I’ll work the machines myself.’ Then he sighed and, with a few simple moves, loosened her straps, arm, leg, leg, arm. Wincing, she sat up, and let herself slide down to the floor.

‘Let me guess, it’s back to my cell now.’

‘Until the next time.’ He had obviously achieved whatever piece of subterfuge he had intended, and yet he still seemed less than delighted.

He escorted her back to the cell himself, and she guessed he did not want guards examining her too closely. She felt lucky because, if he had wanted to, he could easily have put enough marks on her to defy any scrutiny.

And she felt doubly lucky, in that case. While he was unbuckling her ankles, she had palmed a probe from the medical kit. She was no expert housebreaker, but the locks on Salma’s bonds were big and crude, and she possessed an artificer’s training, after all.

Outside her cell, Thalric turned to the guards — the same two he had brought all the way from Helleron. They took orders only from him.

‘Nobody is to see the prisoners except me,’ he told them. ‘If anyone insists on it, and won’t take my name as a warning, then you’re to kill the prisoners first, no mercy.’ The girl knows too much just now, and I have no time to finish with her. He left them abruptly, for he had an overdue appointment to keep.

He went to meet Ulther in the war room. The place was a suitable testament to the old man’s sense of drama. He kept it on the same underground floor as the cells, to start with, away from the prying eyes of household servants, and it was coldly lit by blue glass lamps which put Thalric in mind of dark chasms beneath the sea. One end of the long table was choked with charts and logistics reports, while at the other was laid out a map, taking in all the terrain between Myna and Helleron. Wooden counters, like game pieces, picked out key locations across the intricately plotted countryside, whilst pinned-out ribbons showed marching routes and scribbled notes held down with tacks.

‘Your area, this, I think,’ Ulther said. ‘To tell the truth, I let them get on with it. One city’s quite enough for me to handle.’

Thalric nodded, welcoming this chance to update himself on where the Empire’s plans had so far taken them. Just seeing those place names made him long to be in Helleron again, where it was all happening. He had only intended a brief side trip to Asta for the interrogations, and then Colonel Latvoc had got hold of him and he had found himself drawn into this. His agents in Helleron must now be wondering what was going on.

He moved around the table, trying to pick out details in the undersea light. Behind him, but extending overhead and blotting the finer details of the map, was the suspended carapace of one of the great forest mantids, an insect that could rend a horse. It had been posed as if in mid-strike, its raptorial arms outflung to shadow the paper landscape below.

‘What do you think?’ Ulther asked him. ‘Another new acquisition. He’s for the throne room eventually.’

‘Is it really necessary?’ Thalric asked, taking an irritated glance at it.

‘You’ve never been to the North Empire, I take it? The hill tribes?’

‘My line of work hasn’t taken me there.’

‘It’s an education. The Empire hasn’t changed them much in three generations, thataway. In between calls from the tax collectors, they’re still cutting each other’s throats and running off with each other’s women.’

‘I’ve heard they’re still a pack of barbarians, if that’s what you mean,’ agreed Thalric. ‘Still, good to recruit for shock troops, I hear.’

‘They do have something we’ve lost, you know,’ Ulther remarked, and Thalric glanced up in surprise. ‘Oh yes,’ the governor continued, ‘they might be savages but they know how to live. Life is short and brutal there, so they take full advantage of it. You won’t find a chieftain amongst them without some trophy, like this fellow, behind his throne — to give him strength, to give him courage.’

‘Don’t tell me you believe all that.’

‘I don’t need to. When people come in, they’ll see my spiny friend here, and they’ll believe. That’s the point.’

Thalric made a noncommittal noise, but Ulther was smiling broadly. ‘When you’re done there, Captain, I have something else to show you. Another jewel in my collection. Perhaps the jewel.’

That caught Thalric’s attention. ‘Lead on,’ he said.

It was a short walk. Ulther took him to the cells, and for a moment Thalric thought the trouble would start right then, but this was a different prisoner, another woman, a local.

‘Her name,’ said Ulther, as if savouring it, ‘is Kymene. But they call her the Maid.’

Thalric was instantly struck by her, less by her appearance than her manner. She had been resting on a straw mattress when they arrived, but she stood up instantly, waiting in the cell’s exact centre with a fighter’s poise. Her skin was the familiar blue-grey of all Mynans, and her hair was dark, cut clumsily short. Ulther had dressed her in a simple sleeveless tunic and breeches, giving her an almost boyish look. Except for a row of bars her cell was open along one side. Despite being kept on display like a wild beast, she stared straight into Thalric’s eyes. There was a challenge and a contempt there, and he felt something respond within himself. Defiance was a dangerous flag for a captive young woman to fly so plainly. Her eyes were steel, though. He felt a shock almost physical as he met their gaze. No surrender, they seemed to say.

‘What’s so special then?’ he asked the governor, trying to keep his voice casual.

‘Special? My dear Thalric, she is the resistance. She’s their adored leader, and a merry chase she led us, too. She was top of the wanted list for all of a year and a season, running the poor Rekef ragged trying to trap her. We tried everything. We infiltrated her followers; she killed our spies. We tortured family members; they lied to us. I’ve never known the like. To capture her in the end I had to turn to freelancers, the wretched scum.’

Thalric frowned. ‘You did well to catch her. When do you start her interrogation?’

Ulther laughed jovially. ‘Not so hasty, old friend. We’ve had her here two tendays so far. We’re breaking her down, piece by piece.’

‘Two tendays, and you’ve not put her to the question?’ Thalric heard the disbelief in his own voice, but Ulther blithely ignored it.

‘I prefer to break them slowly,’ Ulther told him. ‘No sun, no air, no freedom — and no privacy. We’ll rebuild her mind, my friend, piece by piece. Every dawn she is less the rebel and more. . pliable. Soon, what will she not promise for a glimpse of the outside world?’

He wants her for his wretched collection, Thalric finally understood, and it was a sourly amusing thought. The old man had been wise enough, before now, to confine his tastes to imported vintages. To invite this woman into his bed would be a death sentence for him, like as not. The amusing thing was that she had not seen it either. She held on to her pride so hard that she could not grasp the escape being offered to her.

Still. . on meeting Kymene’s eyes, he could see what Ulther so desired there. She was not beautiful in any sense that Thalric usually understood. She was not the scintillating Grief in Chains, or even of the proper imperial proportions of the slave Hreya. In that look, so fierce with lancing disdain, she seemed unattainable, and that was somehow more attractive than mere beauty.

But Ulther was still playing a dangerous game. ‘Should she not have been interrogated immediately, though, concerning her fellows in the resistance?’ Thalric asked.

‘Time enough for that,’ Ulther replied vaguely.

Thalric saw the woman shake her head slightly with a cold smile, and he wondered, Would she talk, even so? Mere pain and the threat of it might be something she was proof against. She was armoured in her belief.

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your new sycophant?’ Kymene spoke, and her voice was mocking. ‘You do love to parade them past me.’

‘My dear, this is Captain Thalric of the Rekef Outlander, and he was with me here when I first captured your city,’ Ulther told her. ‘You owe him a debt of gratitude almost as much as you owe me.’

She studied them both, and obviously found nothing to choose between them. ‘Then it shall be paid. Do you want me to curtsey now?’ she said. ‘Or perhaps I should get on my knees, I’m so honoured.’

A soldier came in then, and stood waiting to one side until Ulther went over to him. Thalric watched carefully, thinking, And here it starts. He realized Kymene was watching too. She was kept underground and behind bars, but she was looking out for anything that would help her. He liked to think that in her position he would do the same.

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Ulther suddenly demanded, gripping the soldier by the shoulder strap of his armour. ‘Who took her? Where?’

The soldier’s reply was low, but his glance in Thalric’s direction told it all. Ulther let go of the man suddenly. ‘Get out!’ he snapped, and then turned to his old friend with an expression of forced good humour.

‘Thalric, that fellow had a strange tale to tell me.’

‘Really?’ Internally, Thalric was bracing himself.

‘He said that my Butterfly, my dancer, has been taken from her room, and now nobody knows where she is.’

‘I know,’ Thalric said. ‘I ordered it.’

‘You ordered it.’ The governor let a slow breath pass before coming closer. ‘Somewhat of a liberty, Captain. And why, if I may ask?’

‘You’re right, she’s a remarkable specimen,’ Thalric replied blandly, ‘and it so happens that my future projects west of here could use just such an operative. You know how the Rekef Outlander needs all sorts, all skills. Helleron is in a delicate enough state just now, and she could tip it. I have therefore requisitioned her.’

Ulther’s control was admirable, and he even managed a smile. ‘Requisitioned, is it? I am governor of Myna remember, Thalric. You know this. You are an old friend, but under whose authority, Captain, can you go about requisitioning my possessions?’

‘I am a captain of the Imperial Army, but also a major of the Rekef. My work in the west is Rekef business.’

‘I know you’re bloody Rekef. I directed you at them, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘Then you should understand. Imperial needs come before personal ones, Governor.’

‘But I hadn’t even. .’ Ulther’s meaty hands crushed the air impotently, and Thalric mentally provided had her yet to finish the sentence.

‘I’m sorry, Governor,’ he said, affecting to sound both businesslike and bored, ‘but she’s quite unique, as you’ve obviously noticed. If I’m to take Helleron it’s a matter of hearts and minds as well as bodies and swords. You can see how she’d be of use to me.’

And he smiled. Ulther was staring at him as though he had turned into a venomous thing — which in a sense he had.

‘I don’t know you,’ the other man said.

‘Well, it has been a long time.’ Thalric met his gaze levelly. ‘You don’t grudge the Empire this small thing, surely?’

And Ulther smiled, although it did not reach his eyes. ‘Not at all, Major, although you. . might just have asked. When, may I ask, shall she be returned to me?’

‘Returned?’ Thalric answered. ‘Impossible to say, although I think it likely that, by the time I’m done with her, she will know more than it is healthy for a slave to know. We must all make sacrifices, Governor, for the Empire’s good.’

Ulther nodded ponderously. ‘Ah, well, that I can understand, Major.’ And he kept the smile as he left to ascend again to the sunlit levels, but Thalric did not want to think what his expression might become after that.

And before he himself followed, he looked again at Kymene, who was studying him carefully. For a second, in her eyes, there was a look almost of complicity. She enjoyed that scene.

He made himself follow Ulther, but he was aware of her eyes following him all the way.