Empire in Black and Gold

Twenty-eight

Chyses’ two men had remained in the storeroom to guard their retreat, in case anyone sought to bar it against them. Chyses himself had taken the rest where his map led, up stairs and through dim corridors lit only by the slanting moon. He carried a mineral-oil lighter which he struck up only when the map proved impossible to decipher in the gloom, and he led them with a kind of blind confidence.

Achaeos knew, though, even before they came to the large hallway, that Chyses was not entirely sure where they were.

The room itself quite obviously took him aback. The ceiling was two storeys high, with a grand flight of stone-faced steps taking up half the floor space. Chyses hissed to himself and took the map out again. Tisamon and Tynisa stood waiting a few paces to either side.

‘I think. .’ Chyses said, trying to get the map angled towards moonlight. The windows were so high up on the wall behind them that their light slanted directly to the far end of the room, rippling up the stairs. Irritably, he struck up the lamp again, and tried to unpuzzle the map by its pale flame.

‘Let me see.’ Totho came forward, balancing the crossbow in one hand. Chyses jerked the map irritably away from him — and at that very moment a Wasp soldier appeared at the top of the stairs.

He did not run for help. Instead he started down the steps towards them with an angry cry. Later, Tynisa guessed that all he had seen were Totho and Chyses. She and Tisamon, silent and still in the darkness, had escaped his notice.

She was a pace towards the guard, still unseen, when Totho let fly with the crossbow. The first bolt, by sheer luck, caught the man in the shoulder. He lost his footing on the stairs and clattered back onto them with a yell. The second shot, following hard on the first, shattered into pieces against the steps, while the third took him in mid-chest as he sat up, a perfect target-range hit, slamming him down again and cutting short his cry of warning.

There was no immediate uproar from around them, but they knew it would soon be coming. ‘Which way, Chyses?’ hissed Tisamon, and perhaps the threat implicit in his voice brought the man’s judgment into focus, because he was now pointing back into the hallway they had just exited.

‘Next door along,’ he told them. ‘Stairs down, should be.’

Tisamon was already past him and gone. Totho was still fumbling fresh bolts into the wooden magazine atop his bow. ‘Come on,’ Tynisa urged him, and then she realized that Toran Awe, was not following them.

‘What-?’

‘I will speak to them when they come,’ the Grasshopper said calmly. ‘I will send them the wrong way. After all, I am militia. I am supposed to be here.’

Tynisa gave her a quick nod, and then followed Totho along the hall.

This time Chyses was right, or at least his map was. The plain stone stairs took them into the earth again, and to another hallway with small doors to one side. Totho was already bustling towards one with the autoclef, a spiny device about a foot long which he fed into the keyhole and then adjusted. As it click-clicked to itself within the lock, Totho gritted his teeth and continued to play with it, cycling through various combinations of teeth in search of the one that would move the tumblers. It did not look like a high-standard lock but something workaday and easily made. It should not be taking this long, surely.

Finally, it clicked, and the door pulled open as he removed the autoclef. Inside were two ragged Fly-kinden men, blinking sleepily up at them.

‘Who are these?’ one of them demanded of the other, but Tynisa just pointed to one side.

‘Go. Get out and don’t ask questions,’ she said and, still not quite believing their good fortune, they fled.

They found three locals in the other cells, and then two empty ones. There was no sign of Salma or Che.

‘Kymene’s cell lies deeper than this,’ Chyses announced. ‘We have to move on.’

‘What about our friends?’ Tynisa demanded, and he shrugged.

‘We don’t know where they are. We do know where Kymene is and that’s all we know.’ The locals they had rescued had already vanished in the opposite direction.

There was a gasp from along the corridor, and they saw two servants standing there, having just come up from some deeper level. They immediately turned to flee and Tisamon was on them like an arrow, charging down the hall towards them.

‘No!’ Chyses yelled, and then the servants were rebounding at the far end of the hall, as a soldier suddenly appeared there. In an instant his hand was outstretched, energy crackling from it. Tisamon dropped to his knees, skidding along the smooth flags of the floor, and the bolt of fire lanced over his head even as he rammed his claw forward, taking the man in the side and then again across the throat as he fell.

They could hear a disturbance on the floor above, but seeming to get fainter as they listened. Tynisa hoped Toran Awe would be successful in her subterfuge and keep them running, and that the Grasshopper would not suffer for it.

‘Downwards,’ Chyses hissed, and two turns later he at last found a stairway for them. By now Tynisa had lost all track of whether they were above or below the storeroom through which they had entered, but just as she was deciding that Chyses had lost the way again, Achaeos spoke from her elbow.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘We’re getting closer.’

His face, grey and white-eyed, was unreadable.

Chyses was moving faster now, informed constantly by the sounds from above that their sands of opportunity were running out. He took less care now, he was almost running headlong. Tynisa and Tisamon could keep up with him, but she knew that Totho was clumping along increasingly far at the rear. Achaeos could be anywhere. She lost track of him from moment to moment.

Then, ahead of them, a door burst open and Wasp soldiers came out.

Chyses hit the first one head on. He could not have stopped if he had wanted to. He had a long dagger drawn and, as the two of them went over, he was already stabbing at the man savagely. The second man clear of the door tried to back away, almost tripping over Chyses and then righting himself with a flash of his wings. In that moment Tynisa was on him. Her first lunge merely scraped on his armour, giving him a chance to drag his shortsword clear of its scabbard. But before he could thrust it into her she was over his guard, the point of her rapier entering under his ribs and pressing forward until only inches of the blade could be seen between flesh and hilt. He stabbed at her anyway, even as his legs gave way, but she twisted out of the blade’s path easily, pushing down on his shoulder to yank her sword free.

She turned to find Tisamon had felled two more, Wasps without armour, and was lunging at another who was trying to back away from the doorway. The vicious claw slashed the man across the chest, but shallowly, and then a bolt of Wasp-sting energy lashed out to char the facing wall, making Tisamon duck sideways out of view. Tynisa made to lunge through the doorway past him but, while she was still thinking it, Achaeos put in a brief appearance, crouching low and already releasing his bowstring as she saw him. There was a cry from inside, and she and Tisamon went sweeping into the room in the next moment.

Instantly Tisamon was brought up short, snapping himself back into a defensive stance with his claw raised high to confront some great menace. She pushed past him, running her blade into the adversary whose chest Tisamon had already slashed so that he sprawled back across a great table.

There was a last Wasp there, at the far end of the room, and she registered his widening glance. There was an arrow in him, the shaft shuddering as he tried to remain standing. He had his hand held out towards her and, had he not been a Wasp, she might have thought it a gesture of supplication.

Tynisa froze: he was too far to take a run at. While she hesitated, another arrow seemed to flower magically beside the first, and a gush of blood burst from his lips. The Wasp fell back against the wall and slid to the ground.

That was it. There were no more of them. It came to her afterwards that, aside from the first two soldiers, the rest had not been in armour, had in fact been dressed in civilian clothes.

Tisamon was now advancing down the length of the table’s far side, and at last she saw what had so startled him. The carapace of a gigantic praying mantis hung on wires, looming over the table. Tisamon stared up at it and then, with an angry sound, he vaulted onto the table, scattering papers, and sliced through the wires with three swift blows. In a moment the macabre display was tumbling down, chitin plates bouncing and cracking.

Tynisa saw that the table had some kind of map on it, and papers as well, closely written with numbers. She swept up as many of them as she could grab and folded them, stuffed them into her tunic. Stenwold will like these, she had decided.

Chyses was in the doorway with his bloodied dagger. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he insisted.

‘You led us here,’ she replied sharply. ‘Now lead us where we’re supposed to be.’

Thalric did what he could with the wound. Ten years’ worth of field surgery in yet more friendless places than this came to his aid. The Scorpion’s claws had punched straight through his copperweave mail, leaving two jagged circles of broken links. He wondered, if he had not been wearing it, whether he might have lost his arm at the shoulder.

He took a moment, out of sight of the world, and even of te Berro, just to sag against a wall and close his eyes. It had been a rough night and the worst was still to come. Already he could hear running feet and he had left a pretty pattern of bodies in the garden and on the upper tier. Let them come flooding upwards. Let them start their search there on the terrace itself, or stare up at the skies for aerial assassins. He was already heading in the opposite direction.

Yes, quite. It seemed his whole career had reversed direction recently. He could not quite disentangle the pain in his shoulder from the feeling of defeat and despair that attended his mission. It should not have to be like this, a man turning on his friend, but Thalric was above all a loyal servant of the Empire.

He was also a loyal servant of the Rekef and, if he strained his imagination just far enough, he could justify to himself that the two were the same thing.

He had run ragged his reserves of strength in that fight, so his sword would be his first resort now. Using the Art-made sting of his people — which had become the symbol of their conquest in the eyes of the conquered — was draining on one’s physical reserves.

He knew he could have let te Berro and his agents deal with Ulther, but that would have been one betrayal further than he was willing to go. If things went badly, if Ulther had more sycophants to deploy, or even managed to kill him personally, then perhaps there would be some balance restored in that. He pushed himself away from the wall with a groan, and started off on his way to Ulther’s harem. The thought that he might encounter Ulther in the throes of the old man’s passions drew an involuntary, horrified laugh from him.

The servants he passed flinched away from him at the sight of his grim expression or his bloodied shoulder. There was a great deal of commotion on the upper floors that Thalric passed through like a ghost, and as he descended the stairs it was like going underwater, suddenly so quiet, but with a pressure in his head he knew was bred of doubt and guilt.

There were half a dozen guards in a sentry post near the cells, but Tisamon was running ahead of the pack now, and Tynisa got there just in time to put her rapier in the back of one who was trying to put distance between himself and the Mantis. Inside the sentry room Tisamon stood behind a table strewn with cards and small coins and the floor was scattered with bodies, like some Collegium woodcut depicting the evils of gambling. Despite her willing involvement in the venture the sight brought home to her just how much blood had been shed that night, and how much might yet be spilled.

Chyses joined them then, and Totho barrelled past him and began clicking away at the first locked door, not with the cumbersome autoclef but with a set of keys taken from one of the slain guards.

‘No, further on,’ the Mynan directed. ‘She’s down that way.’

‘We’ll do this my way,’ Totho told him patiently. ‘I’m not here for your leader.’

Chyses bared his teeth and Tynisa saw his knuckles whiten about his dagger hilt. She moved to stand beside Totho, where the Mynan could see her intent. At the same time, and somewhat to her surprise, she found herself seeking out Achaeos.

The Moth gave her a small head-shake. ‘Further in,’ was all he would say. Totho hunched his shoulders against the revelation and sprung the first door open. Inside there was a shabby-looking Soldier Beetle-kinden, a greying, careworn-looking man.

‘Out,’ Chyses told him. ‘Out and get yourself a weapon from the guard room there.’ The prisoner paused only a moment and then went to obey.

Without saying anything at all, Tisamon went to the foot of the stairs they had descended and waited. Tynisa knew that his instinct was right. There would be more soldiers coming soon. Their luck had held so far but the imperial garrison in Myna was large, and all within easy reach of the palace. As soon as someone realized just what was going on then they wouldn’t be able to move for armed Wasps. She cast a glance at Tisamon, seeing how they were working together like a pair of hands now, just like before. She could hardly believe it. Before tonight is out I shall shock you, father. You cannot ignore me forever.

Totho was working feverishly on the fifth door now, and meanwhile they were accumulating more ragged, determined looking Mynan men and women, weighing Wasp swords and daggers in their hands and waiting for further orders.

These had been a warrior people, Tynisa recalled, before the conquest. Not so belligerent as Ant-kinden or the Wasps themselves, but fighting to defend their own was ingrained in them. Just as well, because they’re going to need it.

They had reached the end of this row of cells but the corridor continued, and Chyses was already hurrying down it. They all heard his shout of ‘You’re here!’ and then he was running back towards them.

‘I’ve found her!’ he declared. ‘Come on, man, hurry!’

A woman’s voice from down the corridor called, ‘Chyses, watch out!’ and almost as the words echoed the first bolt of energy crackled past. Totho dropped to one knee and worked the crossbow’s lever furiously, emptying the weapon as another sting-bolt exploded against the wall beside him, scorching his cheek. One of the Wasp soldiers ahead of them went down before Totho’s barrage, but the way ahead was dark and he was not a good shot by nature. A second soldier had ducked behind his companion, and was now crouched flat against a wall. Tynisa dragged Totho into the shelter of one of the cells as he fumbled for another magazine.

‘You’re not a soldier,’ she reminded him, but then there was the hiss of another bolt of energy zipping past the doorway, and she heard Chyses curse.

She tensed, because she knew, in spite of herself, that Tisamon was about to rush the man, and that she would go too, to back him up. Even with that thought there came a cry from where the soldier was, and the sound of a scuffle, metal ringing on metal. Tisamon dashed past their doorway and Tynisa followed suit but it was over before either of them got there. The soldier lay face down with an arrow in his back and several jagged wounds elsewhere, and Achaeos was standing over him, trembling. He held a dagger in his hand, his arm steeped in blood to the elbow. His offhand palm was wet with his own and he had a split lip, and from that Tynisa could reconstruct the past moments. Achaeos had crept up in the dark for a shot, but it had not been as sure as he hoped, and the wounded man had charged him. She wondered whether this was the first time he had killed a man close to.

‘Good work,’ Tisamon nodded, and the Moth nodded back wordlessly. Something twisted in Tynisa then, because that simple commendation from him was more than she had ever received.

‘Kymene!’ Chyses exclaimed, and Tynisa realized that behind the bars of the one open-fronted cell, in the shadows, stood a woman who was watching them keenly. As she stepped into the light, Tynisa was struck by the instant calming effect she seemed to exert on the Mynans there, each and every one of them.

‘The door, if you please,’ she said, as though all of this were her own plan and she had been expecting them. Totho hurried up with the keys and then, when none of these would fit, starting scratching away with his autoclef. Tisamon returned down the corridor to take up his post by the guard room, and Tynisa knew it would not be long before they heard the sounds of further fighting there.

‘Who are these people?’ Kymene asked Chyses.

‘Foreigners,’ he explained. ‘They’re here after two of their own.’

‘Then we owe them a debt for their aid,’ she said, and just then Totho opened the gate in the bars with a cry of triumph. As Kymene stepped out like a queen entering her kingdom, Tynisa decided that the woman could be no more than a year or two her senior.

She heard awed whispers from some of the freed prisoners. ‘The Maid,’ and ‘The Maid of Myna,’ they murmured.

‘Whom do you seek?’ Kymene asked her.

‘A Dragonfly man and a Beetle-kinden girl.’

‘A brown-skinned girl with dyed pale hair?’

‘You’ve seen her!’ Totho exclaimed instantly. ‘Where-?’

‘I don’t know which cell is hers, but when they lead her back to it, they always take her that way,’ Kymene explained. ‘Chyses, you must stay and guide them.’

There was no argument from Chyses now as he bowed the head to his leader. Kymene laid a hand on his shoulder in thanks.

‘Show me how you intend to leave this place,’ she said, and he had the map out ready in an instant. She studied it for a moment, marked the route. ‘I will take these,’ she indicated the freed prisoners, ‘and I will meet you on the outside. Be quick.’

If it had not been for the injured shoulder troubling him, if it had not been for the spectre of his confrontation with Ulther looming large, Thalric reassured himself, he would not have slipped as he did.

He was on his way to the harem, making the best speed he could without actually running. Ahead of him he saw some servants scattering at his approach, but he was used to that by now. Only a moment later, but far later than it should have, did the realization strike him. Servants with swords drawn? And these people had been dirty and ragged, not wearing the plain dark tunics that Ulther dressed his menials in. He swung round instantly, but they had already closed in and a hand grasped his collar. There was a sudden point of pain at his throat.

He was about to fight, to summon his energies for a final retributive sting, but the angle of the blade changed slightly, putting the razor edge against his flesh, and he felt a little blood welling up there, and he remained still.

They came up to him then, a half-dozen grimy Mynan locals holding Wasp swords and daggers like the very piece at his throat. Some soldier’s diligence in keeping his kit in good order was now about to make an end to him.

He craned around, and his captor pushed him back against the wall, the blade cutting a little with the movement.

He found himself staring right into the face of Kymene and his heart went cold with it. She was unmistakable, the Maid of Myna. Caged, she had seemed too great for that space to contain. Here she was free like an impatient beast that had never lost the ways of the wild. She put him in mind of a great green hunting beetle, as large as a horse, that had once been brought to a gladiatorial match. Even pitted against mounted soldiers with spears, the monster had made a bloody accounting of itself, raising its great mandibles to the crowd and cowing them to silence.

‘I know you,’ she said softly. ‘You’re — don’t tell me — Thalric. Captain Thalric, is it not? The political.’

‘Your memory does you credit,’ he said hoarsely.

‘I’m sure you remember me,’ she said with a wicked smile. ‘It seems you’ve been in the wars, Captain Thalric. Or did you have an accident cleaning your crossbow?’

‘It’s been a busy night,’ he confirmed. Her eyes held his, and he felt as though they were unravelling his mind, his entire past, piece by piece.

‘It’s liable to get busier before dawn,’ she promised. ‘Where are you bound, Captain, all bandaged up like that? The infirmary’s the other way, they tell me.’

He tried a smile and found it came quite easily despite her, or even because of her. ‘I’m going to kill Governor Ulther,’ he said, and he knew she could see, in his eyes, that it was no less than the truth.

He had surprised her, though, and he treasured that moment, even though the blade wavered against his skin. She might be the Maid of Myna, but she did not know everything.

‘The Bloat? You’re going to kill the Bloat?’ she asked, and it was a moment before that name made a connection.

‘If you’ll let me,’ he said mildly, and watched his words ripple through her supporters, now a dozen in number. They were all staring at him, blankly or wonderingly.

‘Captain Thalric, hero of the revolution, is it?’ Kymene said slowly. ‘Perhaps one good deed to balance out all the bad ones?’

He gave her a thin, bleak smile.

‘Or is it just Wasp politics, like your little sideshow earlier?’ she prompted.

‘We take our politics seriously.’

The blade was gone from his throat, so suddenly that for a second he thought she must have rammed it home. ‘I don’t care whether it’s politics or paid, whether he slept with your woman or muddied your name, or whether you just want to see what colour his fat liver is. I give you your life, Captain Thalric. Now let’s see what you do with it.’

And with that she was off, her supporters dashing after her, leaving Thalric fingering the shallow graze on his neck.

There was a pressure building above them, they knew. It was composed of a large number of Wasps who, for now at least, were on the wrong trail, but would realize their error soon enough. As they left Kymene and her guard, their pace quickened and quickened. They had done everything save what they had come to do. The last sands were teetering in the hourglass.

‘There!’ Totho said, for there were more doors, more cells ahead. There were more guards, too. A pair of them had come out into the corridor, Wasps in light striped armour. One of them was so astounded by the sight bearing down on them that he just gaped, but the other one cried the alarm.

Tynisa was on them even with the release of their first sting, and she felt the heat of the blast wash past her face. He had not drawn his sword, that man, falling back on Wasp-Art to save him, and she made him pay for that by slipping her blade around the side of his armour plates. The other man had a sword ready but, as he tried to use it against her, Chyses had slammed into him and the two of them grappled fiercely on the ground. Tynisa was about to finish the fight for him, but Totho’s warning shout made her start back. A third man had come out by the same way, and this one was something more. He wore heavy armour of the sort called sentinel-mail, with plate and chain all over that her blade would not pierce, and a helm that left only a slit for the wearer’s eyes. For all that metal weight he came out fast, and he had a long-shafted glaive in his hands, its swordhead lunging towards her. He almost took her, too. She misjudged the weapon’s reach, and what had seemed a safe distance brought the weapon’s point dancing right before her eyes the next moment, so that she had to fall backwards to avoid it.

She heard the harsh ratchet of Totho’s crossbow, and saw the man twist at the next moment. One bolt stuck in, hanging limply from the chain mail, but two rebounded back from the man’s curved shoulder-guard and helm.

There were other guards following behind him now, a pair of them emerging to pause and stare in shock at the fight. The sentinel drew back his glaive to spit her, and she scuttled back across the floor, seeing one of Achaeos’s arrows break across the man’s breastplate.

Tisamon!

But Tisamon was behind them, still covering their retreat.

The sentinel had now stepped right over Chyses and his opponent, driving for her with the polearm. Tynisa stepped aside and lunged, trying for his throat or else the eyeslit, but he swayed back and her blade bent dangerously against his gorget. Then the haft of the polearm slammed her into the wall, driven with all the strength of a man who has lived in such armour for many years.

Chyses meanwhile had finished his man, but was caught between the sentinel’s back and the two new soldiers. They were in some quick debate, though, and even despite her bruised ribs Tynisa wondered why they were not attacking. Chyses took his chance, and lunged at the sentinel from behind, slamming his dagger into him with all the strength he possessed. It bit into the chain mail beneath the backplate and must have done some work because a muffled roar rose from within the helm.

Then Chyses suddenly had the iron-shod butt of the glaive across his jaw. He spun back against the wall, leaving his dagger in place, and Tynisa jabbed forward again. She got her opponent’s throat, but there was chain mail even there, and leather beneath it. Her sword bit and then bowed, but she put all her strength into it with a desperate shout.

The blade skidded from the mail and she slammed into the man himself. The sharp curves of her own sword’s guard scored a line across her face below one eye and the sentinel fell back against the corridor wall, driving Chyses’ dagger inches deeper into the small of his back.

And then she saw the two soldiers come to a decision at last as they drew blades and headed off in the opposite direction, towards the cells.

They were going to kill the prisoners, and she knew without doubt that those same prisoners must be Salma and Che.

The sentinel roared and hurled her away with the shaft of his glaive as he struggled back from the wall.

Tisamon! she thought again, but there was no Tisamon. There was only her.