‘Colonel . . . ?’ Totho
wrestled with the term.
‘In fact I am the only
Colonel-Auxillian in the Empire. I know that because they invented the rank
solely for my benefit. Perhaps one day they will have to make me
General-Auxillian, and then perhaps, what? Emperor-Auxillian. That would be
amusing. Where were you trained?’
Totho shut his eyes and
said nothing.
‘Do you know why you are
here – rather than with the other prisoners? Perhaps you do not. We captured
three of you, and the other two will be questioned as the Wasps question, as
far as their physical capabilities permit. This, as you should have surmised,
is not questioning. This is merely a friendly conversation, Totho.’
Still Totho said
nothing, and his interrogator clicked his tongue in annoyance. Totho waited for
a blow, but instead there was a tugging at his wrists, and then his bonds were
loosened. He opened his eyes to see the girl retreating from him again.
‘Of course, you require
some token of my good will,’ said Drephos.
Finally Totho was able
to twist around to look at him. He saw none of the man’s flesh. The robe and
cowl made a tall spectre of him. Only that gauntlet emerged from the folds of
black and yellow cloth.
‘What is going on?’
Totho demanded. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘You are here because of
this.’ The gauntlet dipped into Drephos’s robe and came out again with a
strangely hesitant precision that made Totho wonder whether the hand inside had
been injured or burned. On its reappearance it was gripping a small mechanism
that he knew only too well.
‘And this.’ Drephos’s
other hand, dark-gloved but bare of metal, appeared briefly to hang a long
strip of pocketed leather on the arm of the metal chair. It was Totho’s
tool-strip, and the device brandished before his face was one of his air
batteries, his little pet project he had never been able to finish.
‘It is remarkable how
much one can learn from the contents of a man’s pack,’ Drephos continued. ‘You
have clearly been trained as an artificer, but I could have told that from the
calluses of your hands. You were trained in Collegium then? In the Great
College?’
Numbly, Totho nodded.
‘I would have given a
great deal for that privilege.’
‘You’re an artificer?’
Totho seized on that statement. It seemed to offer him some small chance of
respite.
Drephos laughed
hollowly. ‘I am perhaps, though I say it myself, the most skilled artificer you
will ever meet. The only reason I qualify that with “perhaps” is your own
tutelage. I am painfully aware that, myself excluded, the Empire is somewhat
young in the game of artifice: three generations from barbarism whilst you
Lowlanders have a tradition that goes back centuries. Still, one must work with
the tools one has.’
‘But the Empire must
have artificers. Wasp artificers?’ Totho said. ‘I can’t be so special.’
‘But you are, because I
do not want to rely on Wasp artificers. They are either dull men who have
learned their mechanics by rote, or they waste what intellect they have in
politics and one-upmanship and care nothing for the science itself. No, my
people, my journeymen, are chosen from other sources. Unless the man be an
outcast, I will not have a Wasp in my workshops.’
‘You want me to—?’
‘I am interested in
you
, Totho. I have never had the honour of a Great College
student working for me.’
‘I will never work for
the Empire!’ Totho snapped, sitting halfway up, then falling back, his head
still clamouring.
‘I have a case to make.’
Drephos sounded amused.
‘I know the Empire. I
know how they look on other races, even if they aren’t halfbreeds!’ Totho said
through his teeth.
‘And what if they are?’
There was such dry humour in the man’s voice that Totho propped himself up on
one elbow to see what was so funny.
Drephos raised his
hands, one cased in metal and one without, and slipped his cowl back. The face
he revealed was mottled and blotchy with grey, and his eyes had no irises.
There were many grades of halfbreed, Totho already knew. A few like Tynisa were
just like one parent or the other, and some others managed to combine their
heritage into something exotic and attractive. Most were like Totho himself,
stamped with an intermingling of bloods that others saw, and then judged them
by. Drephos, though, was of those few who seemed actively twisted by their
inheritance. His features were lean and ascetic but subtly wrong in their
proportions. Even when he smiled the effect was unpleasantly skewed.
‘I am aware, young man,
that I will win no prizes for my beauty, but believe that I, therefore, judge
no man on his face or blood,’ he said.
‘Drephos,’ Totho said
softly. ‘And that other name, the long one. Moth-kinden names?’
‘My mother was left to
name me. My father, unknown and unmourned, bestowed on her only so much of his time
as it took to rape her. Wasp soldiers are not known for their benevolence
towards prisoners or slaves. I suppose few soldiers are.’
‘But you said you were
an artificer?’
The lopsided smile grew
wider than seemed comfortable. ‘Remarkable, is it not? And yet something from
my father’s seed has communicated to me all the workings of the world of metal,
for here I am, so much of an artificer that they turn their hierarchy inside
out to accommodate me. Without me the walls of Tark would still be whole, utterly
unbreached. Yet my mother’s people sit in their caves and draw pictures on the
wall, and pretend they are still great.’
Totho sank back into the
chair. There was a feeling snagged deep inside him, because he was now
interested. This maverick artificer, who seemed to have carved out some high
station even amidst the Wasp Empire, had caught his imagination.
‘Was it your idea,’
Drephos asked softly, ‘to destroy my airships?’
And
there
was a leading question, and more what Totho had been expecting. It would be
better, he thought, to return to familiar ground. ‘It was.’ He steeled himself.
‘Don’t be shy of it,’
Drephos said. ‘It was a well-planned raid. I’d guessed that the Ant-kinden
hadn’t considered it. I have dealt with them before and there is not a grain of
intuition in their entire race. But
you
saw the
threat and acted, even as I myself saw our vulnerability. That is why I had two
whole wings of soldiers on standby, to rush to the airships the very moment
anything disturbed the camp. And just as well I did.’
So that was it: the
final nail in the coffin for Totho’s desperate plan. He recalled in his mind a
brief swirl of images, the fighting, the fury. A sudden lurch took him, and he
tried to spring out of the chair. Even before the young woman had moved to
restrain him, he was already toppling, the pain in his head making it
impossible to stand. Her arms grappled his body, surprisingly strong, hauled
him up and sat on him the edge of the chair.
‘Prisoners . . .’ Totho
muttered.
‘Yes?’ Even with his
eyes closed he could hear Drephos moving near.
‘You said you had taken
prisoners. Other prisoners.’
‘Two to be precise,
although one of them may not recover enough to be questioned.’
‘Was there . . . ?’ He
squinted up at the man. ‘Was there a Dragonfly-kinden man? He would have had—’
‘I know the
Commonwealers, the Dragonflies,’ Drephos confirmed. ‘After all, the Twelve-Year
War was the testing ground for some of my best inventions. I’m sorry, though,
but the other prisoners are just Ant-kinden. If there was a Dragonfly last
night, he has not been taken alive, nor did any escape, to our knowledge. I am
afraid it seems most likely he is amongst the fallen.’
General Maxin took a
last moment to understand his reports. They were a secret of his success, these
reports. He had very able slaves whose sole task was to compile the wealth of
information the Rekef Inlander brought, so he could then look through these few
scrolls and read in them all he needed to know. Details could come later.
Details he would ask for. For now he had his picture, his mental sketch of who
was plotting, who was falling, who was on the rise or on the take.
And his information was
not just fodder for the Emperor’s ears, either. Maxin had his own schemes. The
Rekef was a young organization, created in the very closing years of the first
Emperor’s reign by the man whose name the spies now bore. The structure and
hierarchy had evolved over the next twenty years but at some levels it was
still changing. Maxin had his own plans for it.
There were three
generals of the Rekef, the idea being that each controlled his own particular
section of the Empire, spoke to the others and reported to the Emperor. In
practice, of course, those men who were ambitious enough to become generals in
the Rekef did not suffer the interference of their peers.
And Maxin himself was
winning. That was all he cared about. He was the man who sat amongst the
Emperor’s advisers. General Brugen was chasing shadows and savages around the
East-Empire amidst famine and bureaucracy and the stubbornness of the slave
races. General Reiner was wrestling with the Lowlands. For the moment, Maxin
was winning and he intended to keep it that way.
Of course there had been
setbacks. Brugen was a conscientious man with more small troubles than his
staff could conveniently cope with, so Maxin did not fear him. General Reiner
was another matter, however. Only recently a man whom Maxin had raised to the
governorship of a city, a man well placed for Maxin’s plans, had been disposed
of by Reiner. The city, its Rekef agents and its considerable wealth, had then
been put in the hands of Reiner’s shadow, the execrable Colonel Latvoc.
It had been a challenge
to Maxin’s primacy, of course, but Maxin enjoyed challenges – as long as he won
in the end.
He
would
win in the end. He had the Emperor ready to love him like a brother . . . Or
perhaps not like a brother. After all, Maxin had overseen the murder of all the
Emperor’s siblings bar one, and dealt with several other rivals at the same
time. Nevertheless he had now presented the Emperor with perhaps the one gift
all his Empire could not give him. It would be leverage enough, Maxin decided,
to call for a major restructuring in the Rekef, and then Reiner and Brugen
would understand, however briefly, that any army could only have
one
general.
He rolled up the scrolls
and stowed them in the hidden compartment of his desk, then left to meet the
Emperor.
They had moved the slave
to a better cell, one with tapestries and carpets, some Grasshopper carvings
for ornament, and no natural light. Uctebri had complained at the brightness of
the gaslamps, though, and now oil lanterns hung randomly from the ceiling about
his chambers, making them look more squalid than ever.
Still, he came to greet
them at the first call of his name and Maxin knew they had been feeding him
well enough. This scrawny creature seemed to have a remarkable appetite: it was
not clear precisely where so much blood could
go
.
When the prisoner had
presented himself, Alvdan circled him cautiously. Maxin knew the difficulties
here were ones of belief. What the wretched old Uctebri had proposed was
impossible, quite impossible, as any rational mind well knew. The thing the old
Mosquito promised, the golden, impossible dream of sorcerers and ancient kings,
belonged in the forgotten folk tales of slaves. When Uctebri spoke of it,
though, it was hard not to remember that his very race was supposed to be
extinct, to be entirely mythical. While he rasped the words, with his quiet
certainty, his strange insistence, it was possible for the rational mind to be
tricked into believing, just for a moment, that the quackery was real.
And Maxin now had access
to a great deal of information. There was no single stockpile of words in
Capitas, no library or archive, but through the channels of the Rekef his hands
could reach a long way through the dusty scrolls of all the conquered and
subject peoples of the Empire.
The Commonweal conquests
had brought a great deal of lore into his possession. Most of it was the simple
superstition of savages, but he had become more specific in the questions he
was asking. There were a lot of Rekef agents in the conquered Dragonfly
principalities who must have wondered just why he was asking them to dig up so
much old myth and history.
The Commonwealers were
writers whose early histories were given in elaborate, credulous detail. Here
he had found signs of the thing the Mosquito had spoken of. Not enough to be
certain, but enough to know that there had been something, at some time, that the
man’s boasts were based on.
‘You wish to examine our
sister,’ Alvdan said.
The hooded head bobbed.
‘It is necessary, Your Imperial Majesty.’
‘We had understood,’ the
Emperor said, ‘that she was suitable. We believed you had proclaimed her
suitable.’ He was now suspicious. Maxin liked him to be suspicious. When
Emperors were suspicious they came to the Rekef for their suspicions to be
eased, and, here in Capitas, Maxin was the Rekef.
‘Eminently suitable,
Your Imperial Majesty,’ the Mosquito said. ‘However, there is no room for
error. I must begin my calculations. Even now is not too soon, and such things
cannot be hurried.’
‘This is nonsense,’
Alvdan said scornfully. ‘We believe none of this. What you claim cannot be
done.’ He stomped away, but Maxin had heard the doubt in his voice, and he knew
the Mosquito had too.
‘I am at your disposal,’
Uctebri said quietly. ‘I am your prisoner, your slave – I shall do as you
command. There is none who can offer you this but I. No one else, your great
Majesty.’