And he raised his hand
to touch it, and his fingers broke the surface.
And he opened his eyes.
For a long time he just
stared, trying to make the shapes he saw conform. He was looking upwards and it
seemed bright to him but not as bright as it might. The oil lamp in the corner
of his vision was burning clearly, not drowned in sunlight. He saw a ceiling, a
real ceiling, but it sloped madly away from him.
He wanted to ask what he
was doing there, but he could not grasp why he should be anywhere.
Who was he, again?
Surely someone had mentioned it.
He reached back, and
found his fingers stained with the murk of the void. Was that all? Had he been
conceived in that no-place, and vomited forth into this? No, there must be more
than that. He felt the weight of the memories penned there inside, and reached
for them again.
One by one they fell
back into his skull.
He was a child learning
his letters, the elderly Grasshopper-kinden woman making their shapes in the earth
with her stick, and he copying on his tablet.
He was at the court of
the Felipes, competing in footraces and in the air, learning sword and bow,
flirting with the middle daughter of the family. He had gained a reputation
already.
News had come of the war.
He waited with the two Felipe boys who were his closest companions. The oldest
was in his armour. He was going to the front, by choice. None of it seemed
real.
The ghost of his father,
just the husk of a voice speaking in a darkened room, invisible save for
perhaps a wisp of cobwebby substance above the head of the ancient Mantis
mystic who was calling the shade forth. It had been so long since he saw the
man.
He had been sent to
Collegium to study and learn, but he had gone there to escape. The war, the
misery, the very thought of that gold and black blot spreading like poison
across the map.
The memories began to
come more quickly now.
He was duelling with a
Spider-kinden girl with fair hair and a sharp tongue, and he beat her because
he had been fighting since he was eight, but he knew she was the better—
He was lying awake
beside the sleeping daughter of a rich merchant, listening to her father’s key
turn unexpectedly in the lock—
He was seeing the march
of the athletes before the Games with the imperial banner raised high at the
rear—
He was watching the
great grey bulk of the
Sky Without
, trying to work
out why it didn’t just fall—
He was leaping from a
flying machine to fight the Wasps, and someone nearly putting a crossbow bolt
between his shoulder blades by mistake—
He was running through
Helleron after a betrayal, trying to keep hold of a Beetle girl with dyed white
hair—
Faster and faster the
memories came. He was shaking. They poured into him like acid.
More betrayal – he was
fighting Wasp soldiers, while her cousin looked on—
He was taken. He was
chained—
Her
–
and she danced for them, for the slaves and the slavers – and they
were all free in that moment—
He was breaking free
from the cell – the faces of his friends—
His name—
He was Salme Dien,
Prince Minor of the Dragonfly Commonweal, but in the Lowlands they called him
Salma, because they were all barbarians and could not speak properly.
But the memories were
not done with him.
He was coming to Tark
with Skrill and Totho, all their names suddenly coming to him at last.
He was making fierce
love to Basila in the close and almost windowless room of the tower.
The bloody devastation
of the siege, and he was duelling with a Wasp officer while the city burned and
the wall fell.
He was attacking the
Wasp camp. He was grappling with a Wasp soldier. The blade went into his
stomach, all the way up to the hilt.
All
the way up to the hilt.
And the pain of it came
back to him, and he relived that moment, the searing, burning agony, and the
knowledge, the sure
knowledge
that it had killed
him. All the way up to the hilt, and the point emerging through his back. His
own blade driving into the man, almost as an afterthought because, what did it
matter when his world had stopped? The pain of it flooded through him, and he
gasped and arched back, and then he really was living it again because the
wound across his belly tore open stitch after stitch, and he screamed—
And the void rushed up
for him again, the void that had only been waiting in the shadows all this
time. The hungry void reached out for him.
Someone plunged their
hands into his wound and for a second the pain, which could never get worse,
was much, much worse.
And then it was gone.
There was something searing and burning through him, but it was distant, like
thunder over far hills. And there was light.
He opened his eyes
again, but it was still too bright after so long in darkness. He could not look
at it.
The same hands were held
to his wound, their warmth leaching into him, and he felt – it could be nothing
else – the edges of the wound knit again, the blood cease to spill across his
skin, and he felt the ruptured organs find peace and start to heal once more.
It was Ancestor Art, but
he had never known anything like it before. He forced his eyes open, forced
them to stare into the heart of the sun.
He thought he had gone
blind, but it was just the sight of her. She stood over him like stained glass
and crystal and glowed with her own pure light, and stared into his face with
featureless, unreadable white eyes.
He was weeping, but he
did not know it, looking up into the face of the woman who had once been Grief
in Chains, and then Aagen’s Joy, and so many others in her time.
After they had lain
together, they slept awhile. Partway through the night, she had woken and made
to go, and Totho had caught her arm and held her there. For a moment he did not
speak and she waited patiently, sitting on the edge of the folding bed they had
given him in exchange for his straw mattress: the two artificers in darkness,
the halfbreed and the Bee.
He had known, when she
had come to him, that it was wrong, but she had been so forthright, so open. No
wiles, no subtlety, merely an artificer’s practical seduction. Kaszaat, in
stained coveralls, with smears of oil still on her hands, unbuckling her
toolstrip belt in this partitioned space of tent they had given him.
And no woman before had
ever offered herself to him. Seeing her there, inexplicably there, he had
cursed his memories. He had cursed Cheerwell Maker for running off with
Achaeos, and then he reached out for what he could have.
Now, too dark for him to
see her deep brown skin, the curves of her body that was lean and compact with
the workaday strength of her trade, he asked her, ‘Did Drephos make you do
this?’
‘I am no slave,’ she
said. ‘Drephos does not
make
me.’
‘But you are a soldier.
You have a rank. He is your . . . superior, or whatever it is you would say.’
He did not hold his breath against her answer. He had no illusions.
‘He made a suggestion,’
she said after a pause, ‘but that was not the first time the thought came to
me. When one placed above you asks of you something, to go to a man you are
interested in already, it is by command? Or it is of free will?’ She made to
leave again but he held her still.
‘Wait,’ he said, and
then, ‘Please.’ She settled again, and then he felt her hand brush its way up
his arm, trace his shoulder and then rest against his cheek.
He wanted to ask
Why?
but he could not disentangle his motive for the
question. Self-pity – or was he seeking a compliment? The latter was another
thing his life had been mostly empty of. Totho the halfbreed! Who would have
thought it would take capture and imprisonment to bring this fulfilment to him?
He had not realized,
until he grappled with her, that he was no longer the awkward, slightly
gangling boy he had been at the College. He had not noticed how he had filled
out, broad across the shoulders and strong. His Ant blood had made him strong,
just as his Beetle-kinden side had allowed him to endure. Kaszaat had seemed
small within his arms.
She settled down beside
him again and he felt the warmth of her back pressing into his chest and belly.
It struck him, and the thought surprised him, that she must feel even more
alone than he did. Her city was so far, she had said, and she did not expect
she would see it again. She must have been alone now for a long time, with only
Wasps and Drephos for company. Perhaps in coming to him she was reaching out
for the only contact that might not be a betrayal.
And if Totho accepted
Drephos’s hand, that proffered gauntlet, would this become a betrayal for her,
as if he was no more than a Wasp in truth?
He put an arm about her,
his breath catching as it brushed beneath her breasts.
‘Once woken, I cannot
sleep,’ she informed him, although she mumbled it sleepily enough. ‘You must
talk to me, amuse me.’
So he talked to her. He
told her of Collegium, and the Great College. He told her of the workshops
there, and the Masters in their white robes. He spoke of the Prowess Forum, and
he even spoke of Stenwold Maker, Tynisa and the Mantis Weaponsmaster, Tisamon.
Of Cheerwell Maker he spoke not one word.
She left him before
dawn, dressing herself in darkness. She explained that she had duties to attend
to but he suspected that she did not want their liaison to be common knowledge.
She feared the Wasps, more than anything, and she did not want them to think
that she was free for the taking.
He dressed himself as
the sun rose, in his artificer’s leathers, only hesitating as he began to
buckle on the toolstrip that Drephos had returned to him. He was no artificer
here, not yet. He was a prisoner of the Empire. If he emerged from this tent
with his tools ready for use, would that suggest he had committed himself to
the betrayal they were urging on him?
For it would be a
betrayal of the cruellest kind. They were asking him to design weapons, as had
been his dream throughout College. At Collegium his creations would have been
graded and discarded. Anything made for the Wasps would be used.
They would be used on
his own people.
But they would be
used
.
Something visceral rose
up in him, thrilling at the very thought of the work: to undertake the work for
the sake of the work, and never ask who it might be for.
When he did emerge there
was a messenger waiting. It was strange to see Fly-kinden running errands just
as they did back home. Amidst the Wasp army there was a whole cadre of them
buzzing backwards and forwards wearing the gold and black of the imperial
standard.
‘A message for you from
the Colonel-Auxillian.’ The Fly was very young, perhaps only fifteen or so.
‘He’d like to see you in his tent.’
A chill went through
Totho as he thought,
Perhaps he will force a choice from me
now, and if I refuse, as I must, surely I must, then I will be a prisoner
indeed, and they will extract from me everything I know about the Lowlands and
Collegium.
He went nonetheless,
because he had no choice and no options.
He found Drephos lying
back on the very chair that Totho himself had been secured to, when he first
regained consciousness after the raid. It was a complex thing, that chair, and
now it moved smoothly, the panels of the back pushing in and out with metal
fingers, steam venting from the sides. Drephos had explained earlier how he
suffered from particular back pains, so had been forced to devise his own
relief. His first love remained the artifice of war but he was not slow in
attending to his own comforts.
Kaszaat waited at the
rear of the tent but did not meet Totho’s gaze.
Drephos opened one eye,
and made a signal to the Fly, who darted outside again. The chair made a
particularly complex sound and he groaned.
‘Bear with me,’ he said.
‘I am particularly out of sorts this morning.’
The man was not well,
and indeed was not entirely whole. He limped when he walked and the arm he kept
hidden behind metal must be injured in some way. Totho wondered which of his
own inventions had turned on him, or whether this had been the work of his
imperial masters.
‘You have a visitor,’
Drephos announced, although Totho could barely hear him over the chair and he
had to repeat himself.
‘A visitor?’ Totho
looked blank.
Drephos signalled to
Kaszaat, who stepped over to the chair and drew the pressure from the boiler,
sending steam venting out in hot clouds that forced Totho to stand well back.
From that swiftly dispersing mist, Drephos finally emerged, pulling his hood up
to shadow his blemished features.
‘But look, here he is
now.’ The master artificer pointed, and Totho followed his finger to see a
small figure being hustled in by a pair of Wasp soldiers. It was a Fly-kinden
man, bald and lumpy-faced.
‘Nero!’ Totho exclaimed,
noticing the Fly was not bound but neither was he free, for the soldiers were
keeping a very close eye on him. He smiled grimly as he saw Totho, but there
were mottled bruises across one side of his face and one eye was swollen almost
shut.
‘Morning to you,’ he
said. ‘And I’m glad to see you. Apparently you may be in a position to vouch
for me.’
Drephos interrupted.
‘Who
is
this man, Totho?’
‘He’s a friend,’ Totho
began, and then realized that this was imprecise. ‘He’s an old friend of . . .
a College Master who was a good friend to me.’ Sudden inspiration struck. ‘He’s
an artist, in fact, and I think he’s quite well known. We met in Tark,’ he
added lamely.