Salute the Dark

Eleven

I’m getting too old for this.

The old Scorpion-kinden known as Hokiak paused a moment, leaning on his stick, his other hand, with the thumb-claw broken off, resting on the handle of the door to his back room. He could just turn away, he knew. This was not a matter of profit. He had been in the game long enough to profit from anyone and everyone, and no man had ever accused him of being partisan.

Business had not been good recently. The Wasps knew that there was constant trouble on the streets, even if Kymene’s resistance groups kept eluding them. The response of the new governor was to employ an iron hand. Where old man Ulther would have set traps to lure them in, the new man’s response was almost panicky, and made more enemies than it intimidated.

The new man in question was Colonel Latvoc, who Hokiak knew for a fact was Rekef Inlander. Latvoc was not a man with any interest in Myna, and he made that clear in his every move. He did not hold audiences, he did not consult with Consortium merchants, but instead remained holed up in the palace like a man waiting for a siege. That was something that Hokiak expected Kymene’s people would eventually oblige him in.

For the last tenday it had been hard to do business in Myna, even for Hokiak. The garrison force had been out on the streets in force, meting out justice and injustice in equal measures, as Latvoc tried to scare the city into behaving itself. Hokiak knew of a dozen tavernas that had been officially closed down as meeting points for the resistance, and he also knew that some establishments had been just that, and others had been entirely innocent of it. People who had nothing whatsoever to do with the resistance had been dragged from their beds and thrown into the interrogation rooms, where, under threat of torture, a welter of unverifiable misinformation emerged to obscure whatever the genuine revolutionaries they captured might have revealed.

Then there were the internal purges. At the same time as all of that public activity, Latvoc was going through his own officers. Several men had already been made to disappear, and it all seemed the actions of a man who was either blindly committed to some ideal or else absolutely terrified.

Yes, business was difficult and yet business was booming. The resistance had never been stronger and Hokiak was happy to sell them whatever they wanted, so long as they met the high prices he charged. At the same time he had smuggled Wasp officers out of the city, or falsified papers to help others escape the continuing cull. The one thing he always made sure of was that his clients did not get to meet each other. He was not inclined to sell information these days, for each side was too prone to exact singular vengeance if betrayed.

Which brought his thoughts round neatly to the new arrivals waiting in his back room, the people who had been asking to speak with him.

A man tries to keep his books straight. He had known, surely, that the day would come when someone would ask him to take sides: Kymene herself had already thrown enough hints his way by declaring that she considered him a true citizen of Myna. The Wasps, too, would surely realize soon enough that a man of his activities must know more than he ever revealed. The day would surely come.

It had come.

‘What if I ain’t playin’?’ he asked, scratching the creased and baggy skin under his jaw with one claw. ‘I don’t have to go in.’

‘Then don’t.’ His business partner shrugged. He was an old, dishevelled Spider-kinden, skeletally gaunt and with long grey hair, going by the name of Gryllis. ‘Let them just kick their heels.’

It was an apposite image, signifying both waiting and being hanged, because Hokiak thought he had guessed the truth about his visitors’ real allegiances, but he didn’t know.

‘We ain’t goin’ to win out of this business either way,’ he complained.

‘We’ve always managed so far, old claw,’ Gryllis remarked, but there was a lack of certainty in his deep-set eyes. ‘Or do you think it’s time for us to move house?’

‘I been workin’ on this place a long time. Ain’t lookin’ to let it go to rack and rot just yet.’ Hokiak filled his pipe one-handed, by dint of long practice, and then lit it, taking comfort from the smoke. ‘You jus’ make sure you get the boys watchin’, in case things go wrong. I want the bodies out of there and into the river ’fore anyone can blink.’

‘Right you are.’

Hokiak pushed open the door and surveyed the little back room where his select clients came. He knew most of them gathered there by sight. The two Maynesh Ants were mercenary bodyguards, closer than sisters and waiting for their next patron. The young Mynan woman in the corner was a pawnbroker of rare articles, who paid Hokiak a percentage to keep shop on part of his premises. The rowdy card game between the Fly-kinden knife-thrower and the three local bruisers was just a cover for Hokiak’s own men, who were waiting for his word. The halfbreed facing the main door, marked with Mynan and Wasp features, must be the new smuggler in town who was reputedly trawling for business. Hokiak would speak to him later. This current business came first.

They were seated, the two of them, at a table near one of the corners. He recognized the girl instantly, because he might be old, but his memory for faces was still young. There she was, but what was she now, the one who had been Stenwold Maker’s niece?

Che rose from the table as the old Scorpion hobbled over. Beside her Thalric sat merely as a cloaked, cowled and brooding presence.

‘Hokiak,’ she greeted him. ‘Thank you for seeing us.’

He squinted at her through yellowed eyes. ‘Ain’t usually expecting to find any Lowlanders round here.’ His eyes flicked to Thalric briefly.

‘Do you remember me?’ Che asked him. ‘I’m Cheerwell Maker, Stenwold’s niece.’ She kept her voice deliberately lower than the murmur of the other patrons. A young Fly-kinden boy stopped at their table with three shallow bowls of beer. Hokiak nodded to him absently and then made a great show of lowering himself, creaking joints and all, into an empty chair.

‘You I do remember,’ he said. ‘So tell me, what’s his nibs’s kin now doing round old Hokiak’s place? Ain’t a good time, this, for social calls. You’re delivering messages? Perhaps a gift for the old man?’

‘I… I have some money,’ Che said, and immediately bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not really… Stenwold doesn’t know I’m here, Hokiak. He thinks I’m in Tharn, the Moth city. But I heard of how things were in Myna.’

‘And you jumped on a flier and decided to pay old Hokiak a visit.’ The Scorpion began relighting his pipe. ‘Good of you to think of me.’

‘Hokiak, you’re the only person I know in Myna that I could easily find,’ Che replied. ‘I need your help.’

‘Seems just about everyone does.’ He settled back in the chair. ‘But don’t get to reckoning that, just ’cos I know your uncle, you can get credit, girl.’

‘I know how you’ve helped the resistance-’ Che started.

‘I ain’t never helped no one. I just sold to ’em, because I ain’t choosy that way. The Red Flag pay like everyone else.’ He was obviously waiting for something that she had not given him yet.

Is it the money? She persevered regardless. ‘Hokiak, you’ve got to… I need your help to get in touch with them.’

He smiled, the pale skin creasing about the stumps of his tusks. ‘Now then,’ he said slowly, ‘how come I already knew that, eh?’

‘I don’t have much, but I can pay-’

Again he stopped her, his clawed hand raised. ‘I do remember you, girl.’

‘Good, then-’

‘You was the one the Wasps got – the one that Stenwold’s lot came over here to spring.’

‘Me and Salma, yes.’

‘I heard they put you to the question.’

She could not avoid glancing at Thalric, who, after all, had been the man who put her on the rack, for all he had not, in the end, actually tortured her. ‘I… in a way.’

Hokiak sighed heavily. ‘And now you want in to the resistance.’

Che heard Thalric shift in his chair, tense all of a sudden. A moment later she, too, was aware that the sound of the room had changed. The boisterous pack of gamblers had fallen quiet. She heard chairs scraping back, and glanced at Thalric again.

‘Someone must have cheated at cards,’ she said weakly, trying to work out what was wrong.

The gamblers were heading over. Che stood up hurriedly as she saw knives drawn. Only when they surrounded the table did she realize, so very late, that they were Hokiak’s men. She found herself with her hand only halfway to her sword-hilt, feeling foolish and off-balance, and completely blind to what was going on. Thalric was still seated, leaning back in his chair, but she knew him enough to see that he was coiled ready to move, whether to kick the table back in Hokiak’s face or to blast the nearest man with his Art.

‘What’s going on, Hokiak?’ she asked. ‘You…’ She felt her world shift beneath her. ‘You’ve gone over to the Wasps?’

Hokiak laughed out loud at that, genuinely if not pleasantly. ‘I have, have I? You sit down again, girl. You listen to old Hokiak for a moment.’

‘Sit,’ hissed Thalric, and she did so without quite deciding to.

‘Well, now,’ said Hokiak wearily, ‘Sten’s little niece is all growed up, is she? She’s in town again and wants to keep up with her old friends in the resistance. She don’t even care that the Wasps are here, ready to slam her back in the machine room? No, she don’t.’ He chewed on his pipe-stem for a moment. ‘So what a feller gets to wonderin’ is just what the girl is doin’ here with a Wasp-kinden handler. Bit obvious, maybe? Not very subtle, but these ain’t subtle times. You I remember, him I don’t. More, you won’t be the first to come out of the machine room with a change of heart. I hear they can be right persuasive in there.’

Che stared at him. ‘What are you saying?’

‘He’s saying he thinks you’ve been turned,’ said Thalric, with a certain satisfaction. ‘He’s saying he doesn’t trust you.’

‘What? But I’m Stenwold’s niece-’

‘And old Sten himself would know that doesn’t carry much weight with me… Oh, I forgot, he don’t know you’re here.’

Che looked from the Scorpion to his men. ‘But… what can I do to make you believe me?’

Hokiak shrugged. ‘Don’t have to make me believe you. I ain’t no more than a simple pedlar. All that happens now is who you get peddled to.’

‘So we’re your stock-in-trade now, are we?’ Thalric asked him.

Hokiak leered at him. ‘Man’s got to make a livin’.’

Che sensed the Wasp about to move, and she said hurriedly, ‘So sell us to the resistance. That’s fine. Kymene will know me. Just let me speak to her.’

‘Che-’ Thalric started, but she shook her head and went on.

‘I’ll go unarmed. I don’t care. Look, I’m not working for the Wasps, and Thalric here isn’t either. He’s gone renegade.’

Hokiak’s eyes narrowed. ‘Thalric? Ain’t the first time I heard that name.’

Thalric cursed and kicked over the table.

It was so without warning that he caught them, and Che, by surprise. The round surface of the table sprang up, toppling Hokiak backwards, still on his chair, slamming into two of the bravos and sending them stumbling. Thalric’s hand flared and the man closest to him was punched from his feet, to land heavily, his chest now a smoking ruin. The Wasp vaulted the tipped-over table with his wings coursing from his shoulders. Hokiak’s Fly-kinden flung a blade at him, but Thalric loosed his sting at the same time. The Fly ducked back, his aim going awry so that the hiltless blade skimmed Thalric’s scalp rather than taking him through the eye. Another man tried to get in the Wasp’s way and caught Thalric’s elbow in his face. The single leap had taken the Wasp halfway across the room.

Che went for her sword, feeling horribly slow and clumsy. The Mynan closest to her got his blade out of the scabbard first and tried making a stab at her, but too close to make a good job of it. The tip scored into her leather artificer’s coat and she fell back, reaching and grabbing his baldric as she did so, pulling the man on top of her. His sword thudded into the floorboards instead and the blade snapped.

Thalric did not wait for her, powering his way towards the door that would take him into the cluttered trading front of Hokiak’s Exchange. It opened before he reached it and he saw an old Spider there with a knife just clearing his belt. Thalric, with no time to scorch him, simply collided with him shoulder first, bowling him backwards with all the momentum his wings could give him. A moment later he was in the Exchange, and a moment after that he had vanished into the street.

‘Alive!’ Hokiak was shouting. ‘Take her alive, curse it!’

Che threw off the half-stunned man atop her, but before she could try to escape he had grabbed her ankle, bringing her down again. She scrambled to her hands and knees, and at that moment Hokiak’s cane gave her a ringing smack across the side of the head. She cried out, falling sideways, and then Hokiak’s man was forcing her face into the floorboards, dragging her sword from its sheath and casting it away.

‘You traitor!’ she yelled, fighting furiously, but utterly ineffectually, to get free. The point of Hokiak’s cane came back down into her range of vision.

‘One of my men’s dead,’ she heard the Scorpion say. ‘A moment ago I had me a choice to make, whether to do what you wanted, or to sell you. Now I ain’t choosing. Your friend there’s just gone and forced my hand.’

‘He’s a renegade!’ Che shouted helplessly at his feet and the ferrule of his cane. ‘He thought you were going to turn him in.’

‘Sure, I bet,’ sneered Hokiak. ‘I know, girl, I know that Thalric is Rekef. I know that name well enough. More fool you for spillin’ it, but then I reckon you ain’t been in the trade long enough to get things right.’

‘What are you talking about? I only wanted to see Kymene.’

‘And you’re goin’ to,’ he assured her. ‘Gryllis, how are you feeling?’

‘I’ve seen better nights.’ The Spider clawed at the door-frame to pick himself up, one hand pressed to the back of his head.

‘Send a message to the Flag,’ Hokiak said. ‘Tell ’em we got a Wasp turncoat all packaged for them. Girl, you’re now goin’ to find there are worse things than an Empire machine room, believe you me.’

There had been the one event that Tynisa could not explain, and which had brought her to this point.

At first news of her father Tisamon had remained scarce. He had not been hiding his trail so much as travelling so swiftly and surely as to leave none. At last, and after twice drawing blood in order to preserve herself, she had fallen in with some black marketeers. In a taverna on the Collegium riverside she had encounted an old halfbreed, Beetle and Ant-kinden mixed. Had he seen a Mantis-kinden man of just this description? As it happened he had, and in that very taproom, agreeing to take service with a package-shipper bound for Helleron.

Helleron? It had made perfect sense, of course. Where had Tisamon gone previously, to forget his past? Nowhere but Helleron, where people seldom asked about such trivial comings and goings. She should have thought of that sooner.

It just remained to get herself there and she decided to follow Tisamon’s own strategy. Despite the war, or because of it, there was a regular and shady trade between the occupied Beetle city and its free sibling. Tynisa then remembered the city of Myna, and Hokiak, and how the old Scorpion had claimed that the Wasps themselves liked to keep a little of the black market going.

She had therefore taken up with a Beetle-kinden smuggler by the name of Artelly Broadways, who ran a little airship catering for small and easily portable goods. He had himself and a Fly crewman on board, but he needed a couple of guards too, and Tynisa fought off two other hopefuls for the job without much effort.

The problem came when they were still two days from Helleron, blown east by inclement weather and with the balloon and gondola seeming equally rickety. Tynisa had realized by then that Broadways was a man whose confidence and optimism outstripped his ability, and that he was not nearly as experienced in the trade as he constantly assured her he was.

Shortly after that the Wasps caught them. It was sudden enough. A fixed-wing had come from out of the sun and danced contemptuously past their bows, throwing Broadways into utter confusion. A moment later there had been Wasp soldiers in the air all around them, darting past the stays to land, crouching with swords drawn, on the deck. Broadways’ one piece of wisdom had been to offer no resistance at all.

They had forced him to bring the airship down, to find more Wasps waiting there. In total there were barely a dozen of them, patrolling the Silk Road from Tark to Helleron with their flying machine in the air and a big docile spider, laden with packs and water bottles, on the ground. Tynisa had instantly started considering her options. She could probably not manage to kill them all, but she could eliminate enough to get away, but then they could still fly after her and shoot at her, and there was also the fixed-wing somewhere nearby to take into her equations.

Broadways had no convincing explanation for them, but the leader of the patrol looked sufficiently venal to Tynisa’s eyes. She virtually had to kick the Beetle-kinden before he took the hint and led the man aside, offering to make a contribution to the Emperor’s war chest. Thankfully, the goods he was carrying included machine-cut gems from Collegium’s workshops, which served to smooth the way well enough.

It was then that the inexplicable happened, for, looking at the leader of the Wasp patrol, she heard words inside her head. The voice that spoke them was not a voice as she recognized it. It was composed of whispering and rustling and the darkness between trees, all forced through the gaps of human words, and it said to her, Go with him.

She started so suddenly that the Wasp officer stared at her, perhaps thinking she was about to try something violent.

‘What?’ he asked of her. ‘She’s your crew is she, or a passenger?’

‘Crew. Guard,’ explained Broadways.

‘Excuse me, Sergeant,’ Tynisa said. ‘I was just wondering…’

‘Wondering what?’ He looked her up and down, but the expected smile did not come. He had a broad-jawed, solid face that did not show his feelings much.

‘What’s work like in the Empire?’

The sergeant looked from her to Broadways. ‘Fed up with this fellow’s company are you? Can’t say I blame you.’

‘I’m sick of working for clowns,’ she said. ‘You people always seem to have it worked out.’ She ignored Broadways’ squawk of protest. ‘Is there anyone I could speak to, back where you’re based, or is it a closed shop?’

At that he did smile, if only slightly. ‘You ever heard of the Auxillians? They come in all shapes and kinden.’ She could not tell his thoughts but guessed that he was considering the war with the Lowlands, the possibility of a useful spy or agent. So let him think that. ‘I can take you to the camp at Asta, if you want,’ he continued. ‘I’ll fit you up with someone, I’m sure, if they reckon you’re useful.’

‘That,’ she said, ‘would be very acceptable.’

She did not bid farewell to the scandalized Broadways, only watched his patchwork airship sail on towards Helleron. Helleron, where she too was supposed to be going – so why was she not? Because of a voice, just a voice in her head, which had said, ‘Go with him.’

She wondered if Felise Mienn heard voices in her head, or whether the Dragonfly woman’s madness was of a different sort.

Still, Tynisa was committed now. The Wasp patrol trekked north and east with their patient spider pack-beast, with the fixed-wing circling sometimes overhead. She tried to recall her memories of Asta: a midnight reconnaissance with Tisamon while in search of Che. It was little enough. She was alone now, living on her wits and on three words spoken to her by a voice she did not know.

She gave them two days before she broached the subject. In that time the Wasps had got used to her. They did not include her, their talk and occasional laughter being about people and rituals she did not recognize, but she proved that she could keep pace with them, and that went a little way towards being accepted.

‘Sergeant,’ she finally said, those two days in, ‘I don’t suppose you see much in the way of Mantis-kinden this far east.’

The look he gave her sent a thrill through her because, however flat his features, something moved there. Voice or no voice, she was not just casting herself into the void.

‘Strange question, that,’ he said.

‘There’s a particular man,’ she explained. ‘I’ve been tracking him for a while. Just asking out of interest, you understand.’

‘I understand your kinden and theirs don’t get on,’ he remarked. ‘Odd thing is, yes, we’ve got one at Asta right now.’

At Asta? What is he doing at Asta? But of course it need not be Tisamon. There was no reason at all for it to be Tisamon. No reason except the voice…

‘Maybe I’ll take a look at him when I’m there.’

‘You’re likely to enjoy it,’ he said, although he did not clarify.

Asta was larger than she remembered it, at least twice the size now. There were more and more of the same hastily constructed barracks and storehouses, and a field of tents bivouacked beyond. Tynisa’s party arrived around noon, and it seemed to her that not one of the Wasp-kinden she could see kept still. There were troops of soldiers marching or flying in, unpacking their kit, setting up tents or taking them down, packing up, moving out north or west or south. There were flying machines, automotives, pack animals. There were Auxillians of half a dozen kinden amidst the Wasps. Entire armies were on the move.

The patrol she was with did not slow for any of it, and so she was plunged into the hurly-burly of the Imperial Army like a stone thrown into unruly waters. For a moment they were shoulder to shoulder with other Wasps and their slaves, thronging back and forth, and she felt that she was drowning in the sheer scale of the Empire, of which this was just an outlying camp, just a small drop in their ocean.

The sergeant turned to her. ‘You stay here while I report. I’ll come out soon enough, or someone else will.’ The look he gave her was calculating, narrow-eyed, still weighing up her usefulness.

He left her then, pushing his way through the throng, and his men quickly dispersed, seeking food, drink, dice games and whores. With no option left to her, she waited. After a while of being jostled, she found a nearby automotive wagon and climbed up the side of it, gaining purchase on the smooth wood and metal by her Art, until she could sit aloft, gaining some illusion of being apart from it all. Even then, soldiers were constantly buzzing overhead, close enough for her to reach out and grab. The air was full of Wasps and Flies, and other kinden in the Empire’s colours.

It was more than an hour before someone came for her, and then it was not the same sergeant but a narrow-faced Wasp, middle-aged and with rank bars that she identified as a major’s, alighting atop the wagon and looking down on her. He put her in mind of the first Wasp she had spoken to, and deceived: Captain Halrad aboard the Sky Without, whom Totho had killed for her.

‘You want to make yourself useful, do you?’ he asked flatly. ‘What are you? Spiderlands spy, perhaps?’

She made herself smile at him easily. ‘Would I tell you if I was? Besides, since when was the Empire at war with the Spiderlands?’

‘I expect news of that hourly,’ he said, regarding her doubtfully. ‘So, what are you, precisely?’

‘A mercenary,’ she replied.

‘An honest one, then?’

‘Just so.’ She leant back. ‘So, Major, can you think of any use for me?’

‘Don’t play games,’ he told her, but she could see a glint there, which showed she had reached some vanity within him. ‘I could have you arrested.’

‘Yes, but what would you gain?’

‘You tell me. What’s your name, first off?’

‘Atryssa.’ She had not meant it, but the name came out without a thought: her mother’s name. Surely it would not have been begrudged, if permission could have been asked for. ‘Your sergeant told me you have a Mantis here.’

‘And he told me you’re looking for one. Some kind of vengeance, is it?’

She read his tone carefully. ‘Not that can’t be put off. Just a dangerous man I’d rather keep track of.’

‘Or he was hunting you, was he?’ he smiled then. ‘You don’t think much of us Wasp-kinden, I’ll wager. You Spiders, you look down on all sorts. When did you last catch a Mantis alive, though, in your webs?’

‘You have him prisoner?’ Her own anxiety bled through, even though she reminded herself, It need not be Tisamon, once again. He read her question as simple surprise, though.

‘More than that. Nicely broken in, and playing for the crowd.’

Despite herself, she made herself sound impressed. ‘I should like to see that.’ Can it be this easy? she thought, and then, It cannot be him, not the man this Wasp describes.

She was all wide-eyed for him, and she was young, and he was a man who liked to impress. He hopped down from the wagon in a brief flurry of wings, holding his hand out. ‘Come and see what the Empire can accomplish,’ he told her, and she jumped down after him, knowing in her heart that it could not be him, just some other Mantis pressed into servitude here.

He led her across Asta, shouting at any soldiers that got in his way, and that told her a lot about him, more than did their conversation. They wove their path through the tents and the press of bodies and the machines, around the buildings that were already showing the wear and tear of their impromptu nature, until she came to an arena.

It was as temporary as the rest of the place, crates and boards nailed together, thrown up to enclose a circle no more than thirty feet across. Wasps stood at the railing or hovered above. Officers got to sit on stacked boxes and crates that formed the crudest kind of raked seating overlooking the fighting pit. She noticed a lot of soldiers in the enclosed helms of the Slave Corps.

The major was leading her straight to the stacked-up seating, saying, ‘I don’t suppose they even have this pastime where you come from.’

In Collegium? No. But she said, ‘Do you think we don’t know good sport in the Spiderlands, Major? I happen to have a fondness for it. Fancy a wager?’

That made him grin properly, as she had hoped. ‘A patron of the games, are you? Good. I don’t know what use you might be to the Empire, but it was the sergeant mentioning our Mantis that caught my attention. I don’t want anyone tampering with my prize.’

‘Your prize?’ she asked him, as he evicted a lower-ranking officer to make a space for her. She sat down uncomfortably close to him, and in the pit below she saw two Beetle-kinden, bare-chested and armed with swords, face a Wasp contestant with a spear. She could tell that neither of the Beetles was a warrior, as they stumbled about and waved their blades frantically. Only after a moment did she notice that they were bound together, wrist to wrist.

The Wasp constantly played with them, vaulting backwards and forth, wings a blur, until he put his spear through the chest of one, leaving it there and taking up the victim’s dropped sword. The surviving Beetle tried to back away, dragging at his companion’s fallen body as the Wasp stalked him, every slow move for the entertainment of the crowd. Tynisa made herself seem to enjoy it, cheering and shouting whenever the major did. Inside, as she watched the second Beetle eventually dispatched, she thought, Is this really how they like their victories? As simple and predetermined as this? How pathetic of them.

The major called down some question that she missed amidst the noise of the crowd, and one of the slavers called back to him.

‘You’re in luck,’ the major informed her. ‘He’s next.’

Tynisa steeled herself, but she did not feel she had it in her not to react, if it was him.

The audience of soldiers had now fallen silent, almost respectfully. She caught sight of fair hair as the new fighter was led in, and then he stepped into the rough ring. He was not wearing his arming jacket but was bare to the waist, like the Beetles had been, all his fighting history traced on his hide in burns and scratches. His claw gauntlet was on his arm – Tisamon the warrior, the Weaponsmaster.

‘It’s him, isn’t it,’ the major enquired. She could hardly deny it.

‘I’m amazed you caught him,’ she heard herself say. ‘He’s been a great deal of trouble for everyone.’

‘There’s little the Empire can’t do, when it sets its mind to it,’ he bragged.

From the far side of the ring to where Tisamon had taken his stand there came a sudden rattling and a scraping. They had a corral built there, and now they hauled up a slatted gate, and out came one of the desert scorpions, its tail and claws raised in mindless threat. A creature longer than he was tall, Tisamon watched it without moving as it explored its environment, first trying to climb up the wall and being prodded back by the spears of the slavers, all the while becoming more and more enraged.

At last it either saw or scented him. The creature’s pincers gaped wider, and she heard a shrill hiss emerge from it. Tisamon slowly, very slowly, fell back into a defensive stance. The soldiers grew murmurous with speculation, and by that she gathered quickly that he had fought for them many times before.

‘You’re lucky to have arrived when you did,’ the major said, his eyes fixed on the beast. ‘A couple of days and he’s leaving us, if he lives that long.’

‘For where?’ she asked.

‘Oh, he’s a commodity now,’ he said. ‘He’s too good for the provinces. If he’s going to get cut apart, let it happen before a more discerning audience.’

Lunging forwards, the scorpion struck, but Tisamon was already gone, and when it turned on him again it was missing a claw. It backed off a little until its tail touched the wall of the arena, and then rattled forwards again, and he lopped the stinger from its tail, but still did not kill it.

It is almost as bad as the last fight, Tynisa thought. How can he allow himself to become a part of this?

But now he drove in to finish the beast off, cutting half the remaining claw away, stepping within its impotent reach and then driving the claw-blade straight down into its eyes, not once but three times, until the wretched creature twitched its last and finally lay still.

And how they cheered him! He did not acknowledge it, merely stared down at the dead beast, and it seemed to Tynisa that he were wishing their positions were reversed.

‘He’s a valuable commodity,’ the major repeated to her, ‘so if you try to harm him, we’ll make a slave of you, too, no matter how useful you might otherwise be. He’ll cause you no more trouble, though. You can see that. He’s ours now.’

She forced herself to smile at him, though it proved her hardest deception. ‘I see that he has been punished more than I could ever hope for,’ she said, feeling her heart break at her own words.

She had assumed that the major would deal further with her, take her along with him. Instead the man was gone the next night, and his prized fighter too, and without a word to her. He feared I wanted to kill Tisamon. The man must have read something in her, the ferocity of her emotion. He had not wanted to risk her harming his prize.

She had made an attempt to follow them, a pack on her back, a lone Spider-kinden heading off into the depths of the Empire. Something of her foster-father Stenwold had rubbed off, though, to make her reconsider the idea. Alone in the Empire, they will make a slave of me, or I will shed enough blood resisting it that they will have to kill me.

Tisamon was being hauled off in chains, further and further away each moment, and yet she must now play a delicate game. She was in the Empire, where every pair of eyes belonged to a spy that could denounce her. She did not have the craft for this, nor was her kinden such that she could walk through them unnoticed. She had a bitter moment of longing for the skills of the face-changing Scyla, who could have gone anywhere and done anything, but who had squandered her gifts so meanly.

Tynisa had to wait two days before the right man came along. Until that time she slipped through the ordered commotion of Asta like a slim-bladed knife. She gave herself airs, behaving as though she was the agent of someone of status. She remembered the little she had gleaned from Thalric about the shadowy Rekef, so she let people believe by looks and omissions that she might be Outlander. To the officers she was a worrying enigma, because they did not really know if they wanted her. Nor did they know if they were allowed to be rid of her. She walked a tenuous line, staying out of the way of the highest ranks and bewildering the sergeants and lieutenants.

To the common soldiers serving below them she made herself something different. She could never be one of them, being the wrong kinden and the wrong gender, but still, she made herself their companion. She sat at their games of chance, joined their conversations, though it was hard for her: far harder than simply cloaking mystery about herself for the benefit of their superiors. She learnt a lot about the people she had been fighting and killing for the last year. She learnt about the intense rivalries between armies, between companies and squads within those armies. She learnt that they envied the engineers their pay and privilege, yet looked down on them for never getting their hands dirty. She learnt that they loathed the Slave Corps but joked about the Rekef in a way that their officers would never have dared. She learnt that many of them were here in the army just as much against their wishes as were the Auxillians they fought alongside. The sense she got of the Empire was frightening: that it fought because it could not do anything else. If the Empire ran out of enemies, it would tear itself apart.

Thus, between the officers and their men, she held an uneasy place: an intruder, a parasite, in their hive of dedicated activity. There was only one strange encounter, when a junior lieutenant caught up with her and talked in circles around her for the best part of an hour, strangely hesitant, oddly delicate, as though he was reaching his hand into a trap in order to draw some valuable thing out. Only later did she wonder if he had been a Rekef agent, and been trying to determine whether she was genuinely Rekef also. The encounter had left her with no answers, but something to ponder. So, the Rekef is not as unified as all that. Well, didn’t Thalric say that it was his own sneaks that tried to kill him?

After those two days, she at last found her mark. His name was Otran and he was almost universally loathed by officers and men alike. He was a major in the Consortium but, more than that, he was a tax-gatherer, a bureaucrat. He arrived in Asta, a small, angry Wasp-kinden man with an automotive and a squad of armoured sentinels as his guards, and then he took the Emperor’s cut of everything that had been gathered in from the Lowlands campaign so far. He was, she could see, keenly aware of the hatred with which he was regarded. After a little observation she could tell that he was highly upset by it too. He considered himself a serious military officer, given an unpleasant task, rather than the belligerent little moneyman that everyone saw him to be. In short, he was perfect for her.

She courted him. It was not difficult, either. Major Otran was a man who craved recognition, and he was snubbed at every turn by his own people. The presence of an attractive Spider-kinden was nectar to him. She even suspected that her swift association with the man only confirmed, in the eyes of others, that she was indeed Rekef.

Otran was going on to Capitas, that was the important thing. Capitas was where they had taken Tisamon, apparently, for there was an ever-hungry market there for fighting slaves. It was an important form of Wasp entertainment and that explained Tisamon’s value to them. The Mantis seemed to be willingly cooperating with their estimation of him, and she could not understand that. She could only hope that he had some plan, but that man she had seen bloody-bladed in the makeshift Asta arena had given no sign of it. He had been more a dead-eyed machine ready to cut apart whatever was set against him. Seeing him like that, she had no doubt that, if she had stepped into that ring, he would have killed her, too.

Otran’s machine pressed eastwards, and she went with it. His guards were suspicious of her, never letting her alone with the tax-money, though they cared not at all if she was left alone with Otran.

In her mind she was trying to imagine what she could say to that bleak-faced killer from the arena that would recall her father to her. Mantis pride! It was something she had not inherited and it was something she could not understand.

At night, when not closeted with Otran, she took out Tisamon’s brooch – the sword and the circle – and tried to find in it some clue to his present state of mind.