Empire in Black and Gold

Thirty-two

After Salma had gone Che was left only with the bitter taste of the harsh words she had exchanged with him. The harsh words she had given him, in fact. He had smiled through them, shrugged them off.

She had told him what a foolish thing he was doing, going out into the city right under the eyes of the Wasps, actually seeking them out, and he had freely admitted it. She had pointed out that he hardly knew the woman: some short days of shared imprisonment, a few words and a chained dance. He had nodded amiably.

‘Do you think you’re invisible?’ she had shouted at him. ‘There’s a whole city full of Wasps out there!’

He had shaken his head maddeningly. ‘They are at the palace, and they are waiting for a Mynan rebellion. You heard what Kymene said. They will be watching the ground, not the air, and they will not be out on the streets in force if they want to tempt the Mynans to rise up.’

‘But they will be watching the ground from the air,’ she had insisted.

He had shrugged again, equally maddeningly. ‘And I shall see them before they see me, because I have better eyes, and I am a better flier than any Wasp alive.’ His expression suggested it was all so simple.

She had become angry with him, but it was only because she could not understand why he was taking such risks, such needless risks, just for Grief in Chains.

And at the end she had run out of words to throw at him, whereupon he just smiled and shrugged again. ‘It’s just something I have to do, so if it can be done, I’ll do it.’

‘You know this Aagen is a close friend of Thalric, that you’ll almost certainly run into Thalric himself when you go after him. Salma, we’ve only just been set free ourselves.’

‘That’s because we had friends who cared enough to come after us,’ he said, infuriating in his reasonableness. ‘Who does she have?’

‘Who do any of them have? You can’t set every slave in the Empire free!’

‘No, just one.’

And then he had gone. Wearing Mynan garb, and heavily cloaked, but still looking like nothing other than a Dragonfly noble from the Commonweal, off he had gone. She watched from the doorway of their hideout until he was out of sight, and then she watched some more in case the power of her gaze might, by some mechanics quite unknown to her, draw him back.

A hand fell on her shoulder and she knew, before she turned, that it belonged to Achaeos. For a moment she let it rest there, and then he said, ‘I can tell you why, if you wish, but you won’t believe me.’

She turned round, stepping away from him. ‘I suppose it’s magic.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and there was a slight smile on his face, so she was not sure whether he was mocking her or not.

‘I don’t. . I can’t believe in magic. There is always an explanation, always.’

‘And if magic is the explanation?’

‘Magic doesn’t explain anything. In Collegium there are papers, studies from years going all the way back to the revolution. They’ve done test after test and there’s no such thing as magic.’

‘That’s like a man who lives in a world without wind denying the existence of a sailing ship,’ Achaeos replied. With a great display of diffidence he seated himself beside the sentry at the door, who shuffled sideways and made more room for him than he needed. ‘It is because magic — the magic that I myself have grown up with — is blown by winds that your tests take no account of. Winds of the mind, I mean, like confidence, belief. Look, the sun is out, yet I have my cowl up because my people are not fond of it. If I were to tell you a story now of strange deeds and ghosts, or somesuch, would I scare you?’

‘That depends on the story.’ The sentry now had made enough room for her to sit down next to him. ‘Probably not.’

‘And then tonight, in the dark of the moon, when the world is quiet and yet full of odd sounds, you prepare to take your rest, and the story recurs to you, and you cannot sleep for the fears preying on your mind. Magic is like that. I simplify, of course, but magic breaks into the world where doubt leaves a gap for it.’

‘That doesn’t make sense. Not to me.’ Yet just for a moment the idea made her feel queasy, as though there were a chasm yawning at her feet.

‘Perhaps not, but your friend has been enchanted. This dancer was a magician — or at least the sort that the Butterfly-kinden have amongst them.’ He spoke the name with a certain distaste that, oddly, made Che feel better. She wondered if it was mere jealousy at this wondrous dancing woman that everyone seemed to like so much, or perhaps it was something more than that. Perhaps it was even what Achaeos was telling her: that the woman was a magician, that she had cast a spell on Salma.

She did not believe it, but at the same time she had to know.

‘So what has she done? Not that I-’

‘Not that you believe she has done anything, but what has she done?’ finished Achaeos with an arch glance. ‘She was desperate, I imagine. She was weak, surrounded by enemies. It is a simple charm that her people practise much, but it is one of powerful attraction. Her captors were proof against it because they already owned her. But then she saw your friend, and saw in him something that might help her. As a slave, with nowhere else to turn, she touched his mind. That is all. Perhaps some of it was just the Ancestor Art, for there are ways to catch the mind through that, but those charms fade. To last so long, through such separation, she used her magic.’

‘But I didn’t see her use any. . or do anything. . or. .’ Che stumbled to a halt with the sentence.

‘And you knew what to look for? She danced for him, yes?’

‘She danced.’

‘But in her mind she danced only for him. In his mind that was so as well. That was the incantation, no green smoke and no words of power. A dance is quite enough, and your friend was caught. Not unwillingly, I suspect, for I know Butterfly-kinden have charms of a physical nature.’

She caught that hint of derision again, and recalled: ‘She said, “Night Brother”, when. . when I woke from the dream. You have the same eyes, you and she.’

It was a moment before he spoke. ‘Yes, well, it is said that we were kin long ago. Children of the sun, children of the moon. And we hate them,’ he added, almost cheerily. ‘For their light and their wonder, we hate them.’

‘You hate all sorts of people,’ Che pointed out.

‘Oh, for all the wrongs done to us, we have hated your people for five hundred years. But the Butterfly-kinden, the weakest and most ineffectual people in the world, we have hated forever.’

He took one last look about these rooms, which he had rented so recently. He had experienced such a run of emotions here, he could almost feel them in the walls. What sights, what thoughts. Aagen shook his head but it would not clear. Instead it took him over to the balcony, where the open shutters were admitting the rain.

Thalric’s plans. Always a dangerous game and Aagen was still unsure of what his colleague had achieved, in the end. Thalric was an old friend, but he was Rekef too. It was known that the Rekef had no friends, not really.

Out there, lanced steadily by the rain, Myna lay quiet. Aagen knew the city was not expected to remain so. The resistance were gathering, their leader now returned to them. Thalric had said they were reckoned to strike soon. Aagen knew that of the men passing through Myna for the warfront, a good thousand were still close at hand, within reach of the city walls. There was going to be a great deal of killing in Myna very soon, or so the men at the top reckoned. Aagen was very glad that he would be out of it.

Thalric had now done his work here and was going back to continue with whatever plots he had boiling away. He, Aagen, could meanwhile return to the relative simplicities of war.

He was glad to be a friend to Thalric, because if any man needed a friend it was him, but at the same time he could wish that Thalric had never met him in Asta or co-opted him in this business here.

Her feet had moved across this very bare floor, a dance for him alone, bounded by the chains she wore and by the confines of the room. He shivered at the memory.

I have done a terrible thing.

He could never tell Thalric what had transpired. There was no one he could tell. Yet it was such a thing that told itself, a cloud hanging over him that spoke of his guilt.

He went through his requisitioned rooms towards the door. Only a short way to go now. He had his gear packed, and shockingly little of it now. His heliopter was back waiting for him at the airfield, stocked with new parts and with his stoker already standing by to pipe up the engines.

There was nothing else keeping him here. One last bowl of wine, perhaps, though it would not dissolve the memories, and then he would go.

That was when he heard the slight sound from the other room. When he turned, there was a man out on the balcony. He was a Dragonfly-kinden, and in his hand was a Wasp-made sword. For a moment neither of them moved, and then Aagen approached him slowly, one hand turned palm out in case he needed to call his Art. He saw the other man notice that gesture, tense to dodge the sting if it came.

‘Who are you supposed to be?’ Aagen demanded.

‘I don’t need to fight you,’ Salma told him.

‘I know you,’ the Wasp said belatedly. ‘You’re Thalric’s prisoner. Well, at least you were. If I were you I’d still be running.’

Salma was now balanced on the balls of his feet, waiting for a strike that would turn this into bloodshed. ‘Just give me what I want,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to fight. There’s been enough blood already in this city.’

‘What do you want?’ Aagen asked him, though he had a fair idea already.

‘I’ve come for her,’ the Dragonfly said, and took a quick step sideways, even then expecting the blast.

It did not come. ‘I thought you had,’ the Wasp said. ‘I thought it must be that. Come in.’

Salma’s mouth twitched into a smile, but it disguised only suspicion. ‘In?’

‘At least come out of the rain. Your kinden have sense enough for that, don’t you?’ Aagen clenched his fists, and it came to Salma, in a moment of almost vertiginous culture shock, that for the Wasp-kinden a clenched fist meant peace and an open hand death.

Aagen turned his back, as simply as that, and headed into the next room. If he had wanted, Salma could have killed him right then, but he was too surprised to take the man on. Instead he padded after him, sword still drawn. He can open a hand faster than I can get this blade clear of my belt. It made Salma lament for his own sword, lost like his robe and everything else he had owned.

‘Grief in Chains,’ he insisted, as the Wasp sat down heavily on the bed there in the next room, looked at his hands and then up at Salma. There was a wine jug and a bowl on a shelf above him, with another jug lying empty under the bed. Salma guessed that the Wasp artificer had been its solitary beneficiary.

‘I had her, here,’ Aagen said. ‘She danced for me.’

‘What have you done with her?’

‘And then Thalric came, and said she was mine. He gave her. . no, the Empire gave her to me. Can you believe it?’

Salma’s hand clenched about the sword’s hilt. ‘I’m taking her,’ he said. ‘She’s no one’s slave. Where is she? What have you done with her?’

‘I set her free.’

For a moment the words failed to find any meaning in Salma’s mind. Then: ‘You. . killed her?’

Aagen looked up at him, uncaring of the sword. ‘I set her free. I gave her freedom. I let her go.’

Salma stared at him, and something inside him squirmed with rage. The feeling horrified him because he knew what it was. It was that he had come here to take Grief in Chains, and take her for himself, and he had been thwarted. In that moment he was a slaver, a slave-master, as much as any Wasp-kinden — as much as Brutan or Ulther. The recognition of that part of what had driven him here made him feel ill, and he lowered the blade. ‘You just. .?’

‘Oh, not turned her out of doors. I know better than that. She is such that, law or no law, some man was bound to seize on her,’ Aagen replied. He fetched down the jug and bowl and poured out the last of the wine. ‘Will you join me? You’ve never drunk with a Wasp before, I’d wager. Nor I with a Commonwealer.’

The shift, this change in understanding, made Salma feel dizzy, and he knelt across from Aagen, one hand to his head. When the bowl came to him he took it gratefully, taking a swallow of the harsh, dry liquid just to bring himself back to reality.

‘Have you heard of Mercy’s Daughters?’ inquired Aagen. ‘They are a sect in the Empire.’

‘I thought the Empire didn’t tolerate sects.’

‘Not officially, but these are healers, and they often follow the armies, tending to the wounded. Often they provide a dying soldier’s last comfort. Any officer who speaks against them most likely loses the loyalty of his men. So they persist, these women, although sometimes they are punished or driven away. I saw a Butterfly-kinden amongst their ranks once before. Her kinden has a gift, an Art I think, for healing.’ Aagen took the bowl back, drained the final dregs. ‘Well she has gone to them. If she can be kept safe at all, they will do it. They head off with the army.’

Salma cast his mind back along all the plans that Stenwold had unveiled. With the army must mean to the city of Tark, he realized, where the vast majority of the Wasp forces were heading.

‘I’m going to go after her,’ he said, only realizing the truth as he said it. Not to take her, not to own her, but to save her from the war. To give her the choice.

Aagen studied him for a long time, and something in that look told Salma how very hard it had been for the man to let her go, and what hidden strength had allowed him to do it.

‘Good luck,’ the Wasp told him. ‘I hope that, if you deserve it, you find her.’

‘You’re not like other Wasps.’

‘Aren’t I?’ Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. ‘No doubt you’ve killed my kinsmen by the score.’

‘A few,’ Salma allowed.

‘Well, next time you shed my kinden’s blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes. . sometimes there comes the sun.’ He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken. ‘You should fly now while it’s still raining. People never look up that much in the wet.’

Hokiak himself came to deliver their supplies to Stenwold, arriving like visiting royalty in a sedan chair borne by four of his Mynan servants.

‘See you fell on your feet, then.’ Once inside he looked around at all the resistance fighters while leaning on his cane. ‘Wouldn’t of put money on it. This lot wouldn’t trust their own mothers half the time. Mind you, a lot of sand’s blown by since then.’

‘I hope we haven’t been bad for your business,’ Sten-wold said.

‘In my line of work, ain’t no such thing. We can sell ’em capes when it rains, an’ buy ’em back at half the price when it’s dry. Business is always good at Hokiak’s.’ He gave a wheezy little laugh. ‘I got your horses, too. Them’s waiting for you outside town.’ Hokiak watched the supplies being checked over by Khenice, the old fighter whom Stenwold only just remembered from his first visit here, when they were all of them a lot younger.

‘Got a runner out there, too,’ Hokiak added. ‘You want her for Tark, to go spy on the Waspies. You let her know what’s what, and she’ll be on it. Her name’s Skrill, and she’s a squirmly little creature, but she’ll do for you.’

‘Everything’s accounted for,’ Khenice reported. ‘Look’s like you’re set to go, as soon as your man comes back.’

‘When he does, yes.’ Stenwold fought off a sinking feeling, knowing that Salma was still absent on his madman’s errand. I have taught these youngsters badly, that they are so bold. ‘You’ve been a good friend, Hokiak.’

‘Ain’t got no friends. Just got customers and business associates,’ the old Scorpion muttered, shrugging it off. He did not look at Stenwold when he said it, though. ‘Mind, can’t say for sure which one you are, so maybe that makes you as near a friend as I’m like to get these days.’

Totho had watched Che for about as long as he could bear to, as she conversed in low tones with the Moth-kinden. It was not right, this. It was eating at him. She had met the man only once, some fleeting business at Monger’s place before the Wasps seized her. Now it was just as though he was some long-lost childhood friend. Totho neither liked nor trusted him. The man’s featureless eyes, his skulking manner, the way he kept his cowl raised up so much: it made him look like an assassin.

Stenwold was packing up his own kit when Totho approached him. ‘I need to speak with you, sir.’

‘Go ahead.’ Stenwold had his toolstrip still unrolled, and Totho’s eyes flicked over the surprisingly extensive collection there.

‘It’s about the Moth, sir.’

‘Achaeos?’ Stenwold’s hands stopped moving.

Totho knelt by him. ‘I don’t trust him.’

‘Totho, you had valid concerns before. We didn’t know him from Finni, as the Flies say. If he was going to sell us to the Wasps, though, he’s already had his chance. As I understand it he did good work for us, there in the palace. He’s no Wasp agent, whatever else he is.’

‘Then what is he?’ Totho asked. ‘Why are the Wasps the only. . the only ones for us to worry about? What about his own people? They’d love to see Helleron burn, and you know it. They hate us.’ He was not sure what he meant, by that ‘us’. ‘How do you know he isn’t just. . worming his way into your confidence. They’re subtle, they’re clever, everyone knows.’

Stenwold smiled. ‘Well yes, they are that, and I can’t swear to you that there’s no chance of what you suggest. There’s every chance, in fact, whether Achaeos becomes a part of it or not, that his people will not be our allies in this business. I have to trust Scuto to scent that out for me. As for Achaeos, though, he has earned his place amongst us until proved otherwise. I’m certainly not going to drive him away because of the colour of his eyes.’

Totho bit his lip and made to get up, but Stenwold stopped him with a gesture.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘You spoke to me earlier, before we met Chyses and the others. You recall?’

Against his will, Totho’s eyes flicked across the room towards Che. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Not “sir”, not “Master Maker” — just “Stenwold”, please.’ Even as he said it, Stenwold knew that it was a faint hope. ‘I want to apologize for my reaction then, really. I’ve no right to judge, least of all regarding a man’s heritage.’ After all, I myself have been raising Tisamon’s halfbreed daughter all these years. ‘I will not stand in the way of any man that Che favours. Unless he’s a Wasp, possibly. Or a Scorpion.’ With a wry smile that Totho failed to catch, Stenwold sighed. ‘But I won’t promise her to anyone, either. I know it’s a custom, and even though I’m not her father I know I could, but I won’t. She has a mind as fine as anyone’s, and it’s hers to bestow along with the rest of her. You understand why I’m saying this. I’m not blind, Totho. I have seen the way things have fallen, since the rescue.’

‘I. . understand, sir.’

And after that discussion it was just a matter of waiting until she was alone. Totho, who had gone into the palace of the Wasps without shuddering, and clung to the hull of the fixed-wing, starting its engine even as it fell, barely had the courage for this. He had no other path to take, though, that would not lead him further from her.

Achaeos was elsewhere, or at least Totho could not spot him there, which he supposed was no guarantee. He had found Che standing at one of the upper windows, staring out at rain-dashed Myna. She was worried about Salma, he knew, and he supposed he should be, too, but there was only room in his head for so many worries at a time.

‘Che-’

She turned, gave him a weak smile. ‘You really don’t have to come to see how I am. Or did Uncle Sten send you?’

That ‘Uncle Sten’ — a child’s abbreviation — cut him sharply. He knew that there were only a few months between their ages, but Che always seemed younger than him, certainly younger than Salma or Tynisa. ‘No, I. . I just wanted to talk. . but if you don’t want to. .’

She was looking out of the window again. ‘I can’t understand the man,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe he’d just go off like this. He thinks they can’t harm him. If they catch him now, they’ll kill him. The Wasps have no patience with escaped slaves. We witnessed that ourselves.’

Silently, Totho sat down close to her, within arm’s reach.

‘And all for a woman he’s barely met,’ she added. ‘I know I shouldn’t believe this but. . it really is like he’s under a spell or something.’

Quite, Totho thought, then said slowly, ‘There are ways to. . catch someone’s attention that aren’t Art or magic. The Spider-kinden are renowned for it, weaving their webs, making people believe all sorts of things. . As are other kinden, too. .’ He made this last observation as pointedly as he could but she did not take the hint.

‘I don’t care about the woman at all, but I hope he’s safe. He never did take things seriously enough.’

‘Che-’

‘Yes?’ She turned to him. There were spots of damp across her face and for a moment he thought she had been crying. It was just the rain, though, blown inside past the lop-sided shutters.

‘I. . When you were captured. . We’ve known. . For a long time, we’ve known each other. .’ His voice, to his own ears, sounded like someone else’s, some stranger rehearsing a conversation like an actor going over his words. But this was the performance. This was him. ‘What do you think of me, Che?’

She blinked at him, and she smiled slightly, and his heart leapt, but the hook had not caught. He was no Spider-kinden, no sly Moth mystic, to set such snares.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right. You did as much as anyone, and I’ve been so wrapped up in myself, I never thanked you. For coming to rescue me.’

‘It’s not-’

‘Totho, I know you sometimes feel like an outsider. I really don’t care about who your parents are. You’ve always been a good friend, ever since in Mechanics when you helped me with my notes. I know sometimes you’ve not felt right, what with Salma and Tynisa fighting so well, and being. . being who they are. Believe me, I’ve felt the same. You can’t imagine how it felt, growing up with Tynisa there and always in her shadow, but it’s different now — that’s all behind us. You’re as much a part of this as anyone.’

‘But-’

‘But you’re more than that, to me,’ she told him, and he found that he suddenly couldn’t breathe. It was not hope that clutched him so. He felt the words about to emerge as though he was himself a seer.

‘You’re like a brother,’ she said. ‘You’re family, almost. Because you’ve always been there.’

He wanted to say more. He wanted to warn her about Achaeos, to demand, in fact, that she send the man away. He wanted to shout at her, or get his crossbow and put three bolts into the Moth-kinden, wherever he was, and then demand to be taken seriously.

But her words had stripped his strength from him. They had pierced him like knives. So he left her there, still awaiting Salma’s return.