She remained silent, but
Tisamon shifted behind him, and so Destrachis continued. ‘It did not go well.
It was not well done . . . better not to have meddled, would be my opinion now.
But you remembered, at least, the name and face of the man who had done those
atrocities to you, and you determined you would have your revenge, whatever the
cost. Your family were concerned. They . . .’ And he stopped again, and
Stenwold was surprised to see the Spider’s eyes glitter with tears. ‘Felise . .
.’
‘I remember,’ she said
slowly. Thalric saw something surface then in her eyes, and she looked at him
anew. ‘I remember you now. You are the man who slew my children.’
He could not nod, would
not speak, but something in his face confirmed it.
‘I remember,’ she said
again. ‘What have I done?’ She took her hands away abruptly, looking back at
the bisected table, at the upright sword, as though they were quite strange to
her.
Thalric, shifted,
sagging an inch, and faster than Stenwold could follow she whirled back to him,
thumb jabbing at his face. It raked a line of blood down his cheek, but that
was all.
‘Why can I not kill
you?’ she screamed at him. Her clawed hands hovered right before his face,
twitching and shaking, but still she could not strike. In the echo of that cry
her onlookers were silent. Stenwold saw, in sidelong glances, the same stricken
expression appear on the faces of both Tisamon and Destrachis.
Thalric let out a long,
slow breath. ‘Because I’m all you’ve got,’ he replied between gritted teeth. ‘I
wondered that, when you had me before. How many chances do you need? I’m right
here now, so why not just do it? If you want me, what better chance can you possibly
look for?’
In a voice almost lost,
in the utter silence that followed, she whispered, ‘Help me.’
Destrachis moved
forwards solicitously, but it was Tisamon who pushed past to clasp her by the
shoulders. Her claws twitched at him but never reached him, although he made no
move to stop her.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I
shall find you some food and drink, then a bed.’ He looked back at Thalric.
‘This man shall die at your command, I swear it.’
He led her from the
room, pausing only to look Destrachis straight in the face. The Mantis made no
threats, though, and after a moment looked away.
They did not come for
Che the day after that, either, and she was even provided with a scant meal of
soup and broken biscuit. The Wasp army camp become slowly a more permanent affair.
She heard the sounds of rough carpentry overhead and guessed that the farmhouse
was being extended and fortified. She kept her ears open because, if she could
somehow later speak to her friends, she wanted to have something to report to
them.
General Malkan, she
overheard from the guards, was not moving the army onwards. Though hot-blooded,
he was no fool. The casualties the Seventh had sustained meant that they would
stand little enough chance before the walls of Sarn, even if Sarn stood alone.
What she learned hardly raised the spirits, but it did give some small sliver
of satisfaction.
And Sarn was unlikely to
be standing alone. Malkan and his officers must be concerned enough about that
for the news to filter down to the lowest and the most luckless in their army
and, through their bitter gossip, to Che.
Collegium was free of
the Vekken, she also learned, and could therefore lend aid to Sarn if needed.
Moreover there were fearful whispers of the Ant-kinden’s newest allies. Word
was out about the Ancient League and the soldiers were rife with rumours of
some age-old secret society binding all the Inapt of the west together, which
the Empire’s presence had now brought into the light. Like all Apt races the
Wasps had their dark past, when the old kinden had terrorized them with
wizardry and nightmares, and some vestige of that remained even now. There was
a current of fear running through the Seventh at the thought of having to
confront such a thing as the Ancient League.
The more level-headed,
however, put the problem as Malkan would see it: if, even with an army at full
strength, he pitched against the walls of Sarn, the warriors of Ether-yon and
Nethyon could simply swarm down from the north, catching him in a pincer
movement. If he attacked them first, the Sarnesh would sally forth from their
city. It was not the individual elements, but their combination, that concerned
him.
I
did this
, Che thought to herself. Though she would meet her fate soon
enough at the hands of the Empire’s minions, she would at least have the
satisfaction of knowing that she had accomplished so much. Faced with the
resistance she had helped to build, the Seventh was now going nowhere, merely
waiting for another army to be freed to aid it and the Fourth in the conquest
of the Lowlands.
Yet she had heard more
recently that some problem had arisen with the Fourth and that messengers were
not arriving as expected.
In lieu of better
information or opportunity, the Wasps were knuckling down and waiting, and
their energies were now invested in making their camp defensible. For this
entire day they had therefore not been able to spare an artificer interrogator
to rack poor Cheerwell, or perhaps they were waiting for the right torture
machinery to be sent down the rail from Helleron.
On one occasion a short,
dark woman of a kinden Che did not recognize came down and stared at her with
hostile eyes for some time, before returning up to the sunlight without
uttering a word.
Then the bustle of the
camp quieted at last and the conversation she could make out from above was
that of sentries only, so she knew it must be night again – and she had
survived another day.
I
will resist. I will fight. I will fly.
But she knew she would do none of
these things. She had not that kind of strength.
I wish
I could have seen Salma once more.
Last time she had been behind bars,
he had been there with her, providing her with a source of resilience to draw
on, and she was not enough on her own, she realized.
There was a rough sound
as the hatch opened, but for a long while nobody entered. Then she caught the
faintest gleam of a shuttered lantern and Totho, still in Wasp uniform, came
stomping down the steps. As before, he simply stopped and stared at her.
‘I’m still here,’ she
said unnecessarily.
‘Do you want to talk?’
he asked. A sharp reply came to her tongue, but she realized that, yes, she
did. Another human voice, in whatever circumstances.
‘Please,’ she said.
‘We’ve . . . grown up,
at last, don’t you think?’ He seated himself on the lowest step, right across
the room from her, but the stone walls carried his voice perfectly.
‘Is that what this is?’
They had hatched out of the College, with its protective walls, and into a
harsher world than they had dreamed of. ‘I’m not fond of it.’
‘It’s about making choices,’
he said. ‘Or . . . that’s how I see it.’
‘You’ve made your
choice, clearly’ she said, too quickly, and instantly regretted it. She saw a
shadow pass across his face, and for a moment he seemed about to rise and go,
but in the end it all washed past him, just as with the Totho she knew of old.
‘Do you know where the
others are now?’ he asked.
‘Is this some kind of
interrogation?’
His lip curled. ‘Do you
think the Empire gives a bent cog where a few graduates of the College are?’
‘They were all still in
Collegium, when I left: I mean Stenwold and Tynisa, and Tisamon. Scuto must be
back there by now, though he came to Sarn with us at first.’ She was about to
name Achaeos too, but decided better of it.
‘I’d give a lot to be
back there, with none of this having happened.’ He frowned. ‘But on the other
hand . . .’
‘What, Totho?’ she
demanded. ‘What do you have here, amongst these monsters?’
‘A purpose,’ he said,
and after a pause, ‘Che, back then . . . did you ever . . . could you have, if
I had been . . . bolder . . . could you have loved me, ever?’
‘I always loved you,’
she said simply. ‘But not as you mean, not as you wanted. I’m sorry, Totho. I
wish I could say something else. I wish I could lie to you about that, but . .
. I owe you the truth. You were always my friend, and maybe I took you for
granted, but . . . not that.’
He sat for a long time
as the minutes of the night passed them by, his hands clasped together, without
any expression she could interpret, until at last, without a word, he turned
and went back up.
She sagged away from the
bars, wondering if a lie, even a forced and obvious one, might have bought her
something more.
Then he was back, with
something slung over his shoulder. He dumped it – a sack, she now saw – on the
cellar floor, and went over to the bars. He looked only at the lock. The Wasps
had made a hurried job of these cells, and the door was a section of heavy
lattice that could be lifted out, secured by bars merely padlocked into place,
nothing too complicated.
He opened the shutters
on his lantern and took some rods from his toolstrip, crouching down by the
first lock. It had been a matter of constant dismay to the College masters how
many of their students learned to pick locks, until no Master’s office, private
chamber or strongbox was safe from the pranks of their young scholars. Totho
had never been the prankish kind, but he made up for that with his
understanding.
‘The problem is, Master
Drephos looks at people and sees meat,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Something
to test machines on. Life has no value for him, and I could come to appreciate
that. See the world like that, and you don’t get hurt all the time. I hurt all
the time, you see, because I haven’t let go. Let go of you.’
The first lock sprang
open, and he stood to attend to the second.
‘You see,’ he went on,
‘it doesn’t matter what you feel about me. Because I can’t seem to shake myself
free of you. I don’t think any Spider temptress, any cursed charlatan-magician
or Butterfly dancer could have her hooks in as deep as yours are in me. Because
I still love you, despite everything, and you came just at the right time to
destroy my life one last time.’
And the second lock came
free, and he lifted out the lattice with a grunt of effort. Not knowing what to
say, she slipped out of her cage.
‘Can you get yourself
out of the camp?’ he asked. ‘I can’t help you there but in the sack I’ve put
food and water, and a uniform, too. Mostly they’ll just see another Auxillian,
but you’ll have to creep past the sentries, and if they catch you . . . well.’
‘I won’t reveal who
freed me,’ she said hurriedly.
‘You will once they ask
hard enough.’ His face was bleak.
‘Are they watching the
skies?’
‘No, not so much.
They’re expecting Sarnesh heading down the rail line, if anything.’
‘Then I’ll fly out,’ she
said, and saw his surprise. ‘But you . . . you can get past them, can’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Totho, you have to come
with me.’
‘No,’ he said. There was
no give in him. ‘Once you are gone, I have no further ties. I will die, if they
find me out, or I will live on here as Drephos’s apprentice, devising newer and
better ways of turning men into meat.’
‘Totho, you’re mad! You
have to come with me back to Collegium!’
‘Collegium has nothing
to interest me any more. Not unless I come to it with an army,’ he told her.
She felt her blood turn
to ice, looking into that so-familiar face and seeing only a stranger.
‘But because I do seem
to be a traitor by nature, I have still one betrayal left to make. Or perhaps
you will see it as one last act of loyalty – to you and Stenwold.’
‘Totho—’
‘Listen.’ He reached
into his tunic and produced a scroll, rolled up and then pressed flat. ‘If you
do manage to escape, you must take this to Stenwold. Or maybe to Sarn.’
‘What is it?’
‘The design for my
snapbow,’ he said. ‘The weapon that broke the Sarnesh.’
She took it hesitantly,
as though it might burn her. ‘You realize what you’re doing,’ she said softly.
‘You know what this means.’
‘It means I am giving
the Lowlands a chance,’ he said. ‘A small chance and no more. You’d better
change clothes, Che. You don’t have as much time as you think.’
He watched her as she
changed, and she wondered if he was considering some other future in which she
donned this uniform for real, and stayed with him just as she had pleaded for
him to go with her.
She stood at the east
end of Collegium docks, charred wood crunching beneath her feet, knowing there
was all too little time to do what she must.
Down the line of the
wharves they were already cutting out the worst of the damage, replacing it
with good treated wood, sinking new piles for piers with machines she had never
seen before and could not comprehend. These folk were nothing if not
industrious, and there was building work like this going on all over the city,
not just replacement but improvement.
Felise Mienn stared down
into the water. Collegium was a deep-water port and it was black down there, a
vertical drop providing enough draft for the bulkiest freighter. What secrets
must be buried there, in the silt deep below: what forgotten bones and
treasures?
Destrachis would be
looking for her, she was aware, but perhaps he would not think of looking here
until it was too late. She wished she had not made him speak up.
Thalric had been right
when he asked her what came next. Her future, as she had been able to imagine
it, ended with his death, so what could she do after that? Once he was dead
nothing would have changed, the dead would not be revived, and she would have
to turn away from a blank and pointless future to confront the past.