Empire in Black and Gold

Thirty-three

And there Che waited, with the rain slanting across the ruined window, for Salma to come home.

We held on to each other so long. All through their joint captivity. And now we’re free he’s off on his own, doing mad things.

This was only a ladleful of the whole bowl of worries and thoughts that beset her. There was Achaeos, of course, and he frightened her because he was different, alien, and because of the way she felt when he looked at her or touched her hand. Beyond that there was all that Tynisa had confessed: how the haughty Mantis-kinden killer was not only, somehow, an old friend of her uncle’s, but Tynisa’s own father. That Tynisa, the golden child, was a halfbreed after all. Through the fog of this, Totho’s words had barely penetrated.

And then she gasped, and almost let out such a loud cry that the entire Empire would hear, because there was suddenly a bedraggled figure atop a building across the square, and it was Salma. She saw him wearily let himself down, half-climbing, half-flying, and dash across the square out of the rain, and she hurried down to the ground floor to meet him.

‘Salma!’ She hugged him. ‘You’re safe!’ And then, a moment later, ‘You didn’t find her.’

‘I know where she is.’ Salma looked exhausted. ‘Can someone get me dry clothes, do you think? I’ve been playing dodge with the Wasp patrols for far too long in this foul weather. I think in the end they gave up because, no matter what they did once they caught me, they’d never make me feel more uncomfortable than I already am.’

By the time he had some dry clothes on, made of the same Mynan homespun that they were all wearing bar Tisamon, Stenwold had come over to him.

‘The rain’s easing. Dusk’s on its way. I want to be moving out when it gets here.’

‘No argument here,’ replied Salma. ‘This is a good city to be out of.’

‘We’ll collect the horses beyond the city wall,’ Stenwold explained.

‘We’re meeting your messenger there. The one going to Tark?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I’ll be going there too.’

For a moment neither Stenwold nor Che realized exactly what he meant.

‘I don’t need you in Tark,’ Stenwold explained eventually, but Che was wiser than he was in this.

‘The Wasps have taken her away with the army,’ she said. ‘Grief in Chains.’

‘In a sense. She’s gone with them, anyway.’ In his mind, Salma recalled the parting words of the Wasp artificer. As Salma had stepped back onto the balcony, Aagen had said to him, ‘She has changed her name, of course. They do that often, her kinden.’

‘What name does she go by now?’ Salma had asked.

‘Now? Who can say?’ There was a twitch to the man’s expression, some melancholy emotion rising behind his eyes. ‘When she left here she called herself “Aagen’s Joy”.’

And Salma realized that in all his life, privileged as it was, he had never really known envy. Not until then.

‘I will go with your man to Tark,’ he explained to Stenwold, in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘If you have work for me there, then give it to me and I’ll be your agent. But it’s to Tark that I’m going.’

Stenwold sucked his breath through his teeth like a tradesman costing a job. ‘I can’t change your mind in this? Tark will be more dangerous by far.’

Salma just shook his head.

‘Then yes, you can do my work there. Give me a short while to think. By the time we set out, I’ll have it.’

He turned, leaving only Che’s horrified look.

‘Salma, it’s an army, a whole army of Wasps,’ she hissed. ‘They’ll kill you if they catch you. Torture you, perhaps.’

‘Then they had better not catch me.’ He opened his arms to her, held her against his chest. ‘We’ve been through the wars, you and I, but we’ll have our time together, when this is done. I’ll keep my skin safe and I’ll trust you to keep yours. I’ll be all right.’

There was much packing and preparation for them to do, and Kymene’s people were checking their route out of the city. For those without a mind to stuff bags or pore over maps it was a time of unexpected idleness. Perhaps to avoid Che’s recriminations, Salma had taken himself high up, to the top floors of a derelict building where the boards were rotten and the footing unsure. In stalking him here, Tynisa had been as silent and stealthy as when she and Tisamon had mounted their midnight raid on Asta, but still, somehow, he knew that she was coming.

‘I’ve never been a man for arguing with friends,’ he said softly. She had got here partly through her natural sense of balance and partly through her Art, which had allowed her to go hand over hand up the walls when the upper floors had been too frail to support her. Now she stretched a leg out, testing the strength of a beam. The floorboards it had once supported were perishing to beetle-grubs and time, but the footing she found was solid.

‘Totho couldn’t get up here, nor Che or Stenwold,’ Salma went on. He was sitting in a nook, beneath a roof that was peppered with holes. One of the shafts of wan sunlight touched his face, and made it more golden still. ‘The Mantis or the Moth wouldn’t care where I went or what I did. Which just leaves you. You’ve got some words for me, no doubt?’

His resting place was close to where the beam met the wall, and she took a few steps along it, shifting her shoulders slightly to stay level. ‘What game are you playing now, O hero of the Commonweal?’ she asked him.

‘No idea. I’m still waiting for someone to tell me the rules,’ he replied.

‘Che says it’s because of some dancer.’ She put a lot of venom into the word, more than she had meant.

‘Well, my people are great patrons of the arts,’ he told her flippantly and she yelled, ‘Will you be serious for once in your cursed life?’ and heard the words jumble and blur into the echo all the way down to the cellars. She might just have called the entire Empire down on the resistance, but for all that she could not have kept the words in.

‘I was a slave,’ he said simply, not rising to the bait at all. ‘I was a prisoner. They took the sky from me. They made me serious, I assure you.’

‘Then why are you going? Why not stay with us? With your friends, who. . with people who love you? Don’t tell me it’s just some great crusade to free the Empire one slave at a time.’

‘I won’t tell you that, no.’ His face, in the sunlight, was beautiful. She was itching to punch it.

‘Che says that she, that woman, used her Art on you, or worse.’

Salma shrugged, no more than that.

‘You love her more than you love us, is that it?’

He looked at her sadly. ‘Perhaps love means different things to different kinden,’ he said softly. ‘I cannot ignore her.’

But you can ignore me? She found that her hand had gone to the hilt of her new rapier without her meaning it. As soon as she realized, it took a great effort of will not to draw the blade.

‘Salma. .’

He stood up abruptly, in a brief flurry of wings, to land within her sword’s reach on the beam, facing her. The muscles in her arm twitched and in her mind, rising from a thousand years of buried heredity, came the words, Challenge him.

‘No. .’ she said to herself, staring at his face.

Challenge him. It is the only way you will win him. Show him your skill. Defeat him.

She was trembling. The voices of a host of Mantis-kinden had clawed their way free of her ignorance and her Collegium upbringing. Salma just watched her patiently. Part of her was amazed that he had not taken up his own sword. Fight! howled part of her mind. Fight me!

She jerked, the rapier rattling in its scabbard, and abruptly she had lost her balance, teetering on the beam. Instantly he had stepped in, arms about her to steady her, and for a moment she let herself rest against his chest, the voices in her head banished.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m still going. I have no choice.’ Once he was sure she was steady, he stepped from the beam and let his wings carry him gently downwards, leaving her to make her own halting way.

With the Wasps still waiting for the resistance to rise against them, leaving the city without being seen was easy enough, tucked away amidst one of Hokiak’s caravans, with a few coins paid to the guards to forestall too detailed a search. The last thing the Empire expected of its enemies just now was for them to leave. Once beyond the walls it was Khenice who led them: a line of hooded travellers who might be no more than a band of locals out to slingshot moths or gather night-growing mushrooms. They left as the sky was darkening, but there was light enough from the west by the time Khenice found their rendezvous point.

There was nobody there, nor any horses, but the old Mynan told them to wait. It was only a minute or two before a voice from the gloom startled them.

‘If you’re not those I’m waiting for, I’m going straight home and selling the horses.’ It was a voice strangely accented, and the figure that stepped out in front of them was stranger still. Che let her Art-eyes adjust to the darkness, and what had seemed at first like a very lanky Fly-kinden was revealed as something quite other.

Skrill, as Hokiak had named her, was a halfbreed, and part of her blood must be local Mynan, for she had their shade of skin and hair, and something of their look. Her face was thinner, though, and her ears were back-sloped, long and pointed, with a nose and chin almost as sharp. Her build was the most disconcerting aspect of her, though. She was very small in the body, like a Fly-kinden or child indeed, but her limbs were overlong, not grotesquely but certainly enough to notice, so that despite her lack of height the strides she took would match a tall man’s. Her movements were jerky, either a quick dash or standing very still. Beneath her cloak was a cuirass of metal scales, padded with felt for quiet movement. The packroll slung across her back had the two ends of a bow protruding from it, and there was a Wasp-issue shortsword bald-ricked up enough for the hilt to be almost hidden in her armpit. Beside her high-pitched voice there was little of the feminine about her, and her angular features rendered her androgynous.

‘Don’t stare at the lady,’ she chided them, for that was what they had been doing. ‘Now which one of you great lords is Master Stenwold Maker? I hear you’ve a job for me.’

‘And a companion too,’ Stenwold agreed, beckoning Salma over. She looked the Dragonfly up and down. ‘I reckon I don’t mind that at all, Master Maker.’

Stenwold took both her and Salma aside, while Khenice began building a fire.

His flier was ready for him in the airfield, Thalric knew. His possessions, so few, were already packed. He knew he should leave the palace, and Myna itself, before Colonel Latvoc decided that his refusals qualified as disloyalty. In truth, he would have departed two days ago, if not for the visitor.

Thalric now stood by the workbench of the interrogation room and thought hard about that encounter because it had brought on him a sense of creeping discomfort that he had yet to shake off.

It had seemed reasonable enough when a Wasp officer of middle years had arrived asking for him. The face had seemed vaguely familiar, but the number of such men that he had met was in the hundreds so he had thought nothing of it.

In the small room commandeered as his office, he had been finishing his report for the colonel when the man came in. After a brief glance up he had returned to it, saying, ‘What can I do for you, soldier?’

‘Oh Major, surely you can do better than that.’

The use of his true rank had snapped his head up, thinking that this must be a Rekef matter. The officer was not standing to attention like a soldier should, and that face was becoming maddeningly familiar. .

And then it had struck him like a physical blow. It was his own face he was looking at. Not an identical copy, which would have caused comment, but it could have been some extra brother he did not know about and the voice was one he knew as well.

‘Scylis?’ he had said softly, and the Wasp officer nodded with a smile that was most un-Wasplike.

‘Well done, Major, although I did rather make it easy for you.’

Thalric remembered looking in vain for the edge of a mask, the sign of make-up. This was the first time he had clearly seen any face that Scylis had chosen to put up. There was no mask, nothing but that living face. It had sent a shiver of horror through him — horror at the unaccountable.

‘I really could have used you three days ago,’ he had said to disguise his shock. ‘You do pick your moments to turn up.’

‘And meanwhile your operation in Helleron is wondering if you’re still alive. I decided I was best suited to tracking you down. Travelling as a Wasp officer within the Empire has its benefits. I might even consider it as a retirement option.’

Thalric had carefully not asked where Scylis had obtained the armour he was wearing.

And then there had been the gift, for Scylis had not arrived empty handed. He had been in the city long enough to learn which way was up, politically. He had brought in a prisoner for interrogation.

The prisoner was behind him now, stretched out on the bench. Because of the shortness of time available, Scylis had consented to let Thalric watch him work. The procedure had chilled him, he who had himself interrogated countless prisoners for the army or the Rekef.

When Thalric asked questions, it was about troop movements, the identities of agents, supply lines and the plans of other spymasters. His methods utilized a trained artificer and the devices that hung above the workbench, folded like an insect’s limbs.

Because he was not Apt, Scylis worked by hand. Spiders almost never were, assuming he truly was a Spider-kinden at all. He worked like an artist and, amongst the questions regarding names and places, he simply sought the details of everyday life, preparing himself for the role he would be playing. His voice was soft and patient, almost sympathetic, but behind it Thalric had recognized the glee of a man rejoicing in the skill and the power he wielded. It had been a glee enhanced by the fact that Thalric was his audience, and Scylis could witness the effect on him that his ministrations were having.

At the end of it Thalric had given him his further orders and he had gladly accepted them. He had entered the palace as a Wasp officer, but by the time he was back in the city he would have another face entirely.

Behind Thalric, on the workbench, the body of Khenice waited for disposal.

At some point in the night Che sensed that she half-woke, some footfall beside her bringing her to the very brink of consciousness. Opening her eyes she saw something pale beside the rolled-up cloak that was her pillow and she identified it merely as a folded paper before passing back into troubled slumber. It seemed to her, some time later, that yet another crouched by her, but she turned over, resolutely determined not to be woken, dreaming only that whatever paper had been left beside her was now being opened and read.

And then she was being shaken, only gently but she snapped out of her dreams with one hand fumbling for her sword. The paper, had there ever been one, was gone.

‘What is it? Is it Thalric?’ she gasped, but then she recalled she was a prisoner no longer. They were in the shadow of the Darakyon, with the lights of Asta visible now to the south, and just last evening Salma had gone to follow the army to Tark with Skrill as his guide.

Her eyes finally obliged and the night grew pale for her — and there was Achaeos kneeling beside her, his hand on her shoulder.

‘What is it? Is it my watch now?’

‘Your sister is still on watch,’ he said, which, because they were plainly not sisters, oddly touched her.

She sat up, looking about. ‘What is it, then?’ Tynisa was indeed sitting alert on a hummock near the forest’s edge and, without her Art, Che would never have been able to see her.

‘I need to take you somewhere,’ Achaeos whispered.

She eyed him suspiciously. ‘Oh yes?’

‘I cannot say where it is, what it is, only that it is something that I need you to see.’

‘If I knew in advance, I wouldn’t go, is that it?’

‘It is.’ He said without shame. ‘Will you come with me?’

And in that was weighed the question: how far did she trust him? Was there some slaver or Wasp agent waiting there within the dark wood? What did she really know about this grey-skinned man with his strange beliefs and his unreadable eyes?

She rubbed her own eyes, stood up and threw her cloak over her shoulders against the night’s chill, then buckled on her baldric, the sword tapping against her leg like some familiar trained animal. She had been separated from it too long.

‘I will trust you,’ she decided, and he led her to the edge of the wood.

Tynisa watched them approach cautiously. ‘Che, you shouldn’t go with him if you don’t want to,’ she said.

‘It’s all right, I. . I want to.’

‘Well just shout if there’s any trouble.’ There seemed more to this warning than Achaeos taking liberties or even servants of the Empire lying in wait. Che frowned, but even as she opened her mouth to reply a shadow was looming beside her, making her squeak with fright.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Tisamon.

‘We are,’ Achaeos replied.

‘He’s coming too?’ Che asked, and the Moth nodded so very seriously.

‘We need him. We would not be safe without him. Not even I.’

‘Achaeos, what’s going on?’

‘I cannot tell you. Until you yourself have seen, you would not understand.’

Even to her enhanced vision, the Darakyon was dark. She wondered that Tisamon, padding ahead, could see anything, and she saw him keep one hand out ahead of him, brushing the bark of the old trees, as though he was making his way by touch combined with some other sense she had no concept of.

She decided that she was not fond of this forest, or forests in general — at least at night. It was filled with the sounds of small things, and not so small things, and at every step she made something, somewhere nearby, twitched. Achaeos’s hooded form was making its way resolutely ahead and being left behind would be even worse.

And then Tisamon had stopped and she saw his claw was on his hand, though she had not seen him don and buckle it.

‘I have returned,’ said Achaeos, and he announced it to the air and to the trees. ‘You know me, and your power marks me still.’

He had gone mad, that was clear enough, and she glanced worriedly at Tisamon. She saw him cock his head and it was a moment before she identified this as the reaction of someone listening.

‘I have brought her because I wanted her to see you,’ Achaeos continued and then, after a pause. ‘My reasons are my own.’

It seemed to her that a sudden breeze gusted through the trees, and shook the leaves a little.

‘I have no more favours, and besides,’ Achaeos said, ‘what could I offer, who am already bound?’

Che shook her head, reaching out to tap his shoulder, as if to demand the reason for this performance. The wind was becoming more insistent, gusting and then falling in irregular patterns. Unexpectedly, Tisamon’s hand encircled her wrist, drawing her hand away from the Moth’s shoulder.

‘Whatever you can ask of me, ask it,’ said Achaeos, but his voice trembled as he spoke.

And she heard. The rustle of the trees, the whisper of leaves, insects scraping in the night. A hundred natural sounds, but together they formed a voice. If she listened very carefully, they were a voice.

Heart and soul, blood and bone, mind and will, what would you give?

A whimper escaped her, and had it not been for Tisamon’s hand on her, she would have slid to the ground.

You return to us, little neophyte, with your prize and your temerity. What will we ask? Go and grow. Become great. Don Skryre’s robes and learn the secrets. Go to the ends of the earth if you will. But always know you are bound, bound to us, to our destiny, go you ever so far. One day, in a shadow, in a mirror, in the face of the waters, you shall see us, and we shall ask of you, and that time shall be soon.

‘Achaeos?’ she said, her voice reed-thin with fright.

‘You see them?’ His voice was soft, like that of a hunter who dares not take his eyes from his prey.

‘See? No, but I can hear. There are voices, Achaeos. Who else is here?’

‘Your eyes can cut the dark like mine can, Che. I want you to see.’

She looked around wildly, but there was no one there and, besides, nobody, no ordinary human being, could have given that voice life.

Tisamon, the composite voice of the forest spoke, and the Mantis let go of her and straightened up. Still there was nobody visible between the boles of the dark trees.

Tisamon, it said again, you have been altered since last you passed within these halls.

It shocked her that the Mantis, the most intimidating man she had ever met, gave a soft exhalation of fear.

You were Tisamon the Hollow Man when east you went. Now you are Tisamon of the Purpose. But your purpose is clouded to us, Tisamon. As clouded as it is to you yourself. Do you mean to send the girl into a better future, or weight her with the past?

Tisamon made no answer, but she saw his teeth were bared, his eyes fixed on something ahead. She followed that riveted gaze, and saw.

She collapsed then, hiding her eyes from them. There were so many of them, a score at least, and they were hideous. They were composed of smooth chitin and barbed spines, and knotted bark and thorns and twisted briars, and yet they were human beings, Mantis-kinden features as like to Tisamon’s as to be family. And their eyes were huge, and they stared and stared.

She had only a brief glimpse of them before she wrenched her head aside, but the image, the sight of them, would stay with her for all her remaining days.

Then she felt Achaeos’s hands on her shoulders, heard his voice, low and comforting, and she found that she clung to him because she had nothing else.

‘What are they? Why did you bring me here? Why?’

‘This is the ghost story in the night, Che. This is the dream that is there when you wake. This is the worst of dark magic. And I want you to believe, Che. You must believe.’

She now had her face pressed into his chest, for fear of what she might see beyond him. ‘I can’t believe. I can’t have a world with such things in it. Please-’

‘And tomorrow you will tell yourself they were just men in costume, or that you saw them unclearly, or that you merely dreamt them, but I want you to remember this, Che. You must remember that what you have seen is real, and cannot be explained away.’

At last she dared to meet his eyes. ‘But why?’

‘Because this is my world, Che, and I want you to see it, to acknowledge it. We are the people of the twilight, of the Lore Age, before all your gears and levers. Though we fail and dwindle, we have some power yet. We are the keepers of those secrets that the world yet retains.’

‘You want me to. .’

‘I would share my world with you, if your mind could absorb it. If you could just for once tear away the veil of doubt that surrounds all of your people. I may hate machines, and either destroy them or leave them, but at least I cannot avoid the fact of them. Che, please look. Please.’

And he was begging her and that was what finally persuaded her. He, who could have forced this on her, was a slave to her will in that moment.

She looked past his shoulder, clutching hard to him as her eyes picked them out again between the trees. They were speaking for Tisamon only, now. Their voice was a soft rush that she could not pick out words from. Even now they were not clear: they shifted before her, merging with the trees and each other. Che shuddered as every part of her mind except one demanded that she look away.

She made herself look. With Achaeos’s slim arms about her, with him almost as her shield, she forced her eyes until they saw, they truly saw the abomination that was the Darakyon. Hideous tortured ghosts splayed on the rack of history, had they not been occupied with their living kinsman, their faceted gaze would have flayed her. Instead she felt she was looking into the very soul of Tisamon’s people, ripped out and hung in the air like smoke and cobwebs. They were tall and proud and callous — and lost and sad.

‘What did this to them?’ she whispered, for the pain contained in those crooked things was infinite, as was their power.

Achaeos’s voice was very soft, very solemn. ‘You did,’ he said. ‘You did and then we did.’ And he would not explain further.