For all she knew, there were dozens of women engaged in exactly the same deception, but if she had ever met one, they had not been so poor at it for her to know it.
But now she was a major and, if she had no close friends, she had some very impressed superiors. The Solarno mission was of far greater importance to the Empire than the mere city itself would
suggest. She knew there were wheels within wheels, even if she did not know quite who was spinning them. A lot of her work involved ensuring that certain missives reached her superiors in the
Empire, and she was not supposed to have worked out that they all came from across the Exalsee.
She straightened her tunic, the very picture of a down-at-heels Wasp-kinden man, a little slighter of build than most, but not unusually so. Living a soldier’s life had made Garvan strong
and robust.
Now she would take her other tunic and wash it in a fountain somewhere, to the annoyance of the locals, and hang it out of her window to dry. Soon after that signal she would be meeting with her
agents, some of them here in the garret, others elsewhere at pre-set places and times. She felt an old, familiar excitement. The Empire was on the move again, at last.
A few days later, and there were some empty tables at the Taverna te Remi. Just a couple maybe, but the place had been full to the brim all winter, each spot taken by its own
band of intelligencing illuminati, the network of loyalties and hostilities drawing a political map of the world in miniature.
‘Te Gressi’s gone, and all that mob,’ Breighl observed. ‘That surprises me.’
‘They were merchant factors out of Dirovashni. They were after aviation designs, but not enough to get knifed,’ Liss declared with confidence.
‘Well, whatever – they’ve gone.’ He was speaking more quietly than usual. Everyone in the taverna was, as though the future might overhear them.
‘That Scorpion Valek,’ te Riel added. ‘Valthek? Vathek, was it?’
‘Back to Toek Station,’ Laszlo said, a guess, although he tried to sound authoritative. ‘Good work to be had keeping watch to the north, but then you’d know
that.’
Te Riel stared at him flatly. ‘I don’t work for the Empire, Laszlo. Let it alone.’
‘You’re going to tell me what I
know
, now, are you?’ Laszlo locked eyes with the man, and mostly because he felt that the layout of their little table had changed
slightly. The space between him and te Liss was greater. She had shifted to little closer to te Riel.
‘Boys,’ she said, holding out her hands. ‘Forget who’s not
here
. Grevaris is gone, who ran that brothel west of the Venodor. Just upped sticks and left. And I hear
that clothier’s on Habomil is closed now, that I always – well, probably we all reckoned was a front for someone.’ She looked far more serious than she usually did, glancing from
one face to the next. ‘Tervo’s gone, too – that fishmonger, remember? Left unpaid bills and a job lot of old fish.’
‘People are getting out of the game,’ said te Riel stiffly. There was the echo of a tremor in his voice, though, and the same feeling was running through all of them, of thin ice, of
sands running down, storms on the move.
Breighl sighed deeply. ‘Te Rorvo – Tervo – was fished out of the harbour last night. I heard it from the militia. Whoever did him in didn’t even bother to weight the
body.’ His gaze passed over the three Fly-kinden, judging them. ‘But I suspect
one
of you knew that already.’
Te Riel flushed although, in all honesty, Brieghl’s eyes had not especially fallen on him. ‘I am
not
,’ he insisted in a hushed voice, ‘for the Empire. I am a
freelancer.’
‘Like all of us,’ said Breighl. ‘Like Tervo, for that matter. I reckon the freelancers are getting out of the city, those that can. For those that know too much . . . Solarno
isn’t a city for freelancers any more.’
‘And yet here we all are,’ Laszlo finished for him. ‘True colours yet, anyone?’ He pinned te Riel with his glare. ‘Hover-fly?’
The man met and matched his hostility. ‘I am going to
gut
you one of these days.’
‘Enough,’ te Liss snapped. ‘No more of this.’ She pursed her lips for a moment. ‘We all know what’s happening. Let’s not bring it on any sooner by
fighting. We all know that we’ll be at daggers drawn soon enough. I don’t care whether te Riel’s with the Empire or not. Not yet. Not now.’
Laszlo reached for her hand beneath the table, as he had sometimes before, but that extra distance between them suddenly seemed insurmountable. He felt she was drawing further away, even while
sitting there before his eyes.
‘What I hear,’ said Breighl, in a overly casual tone, ‘is that the Empire might just be the least of it.’ He was watching them all carefully again, but they all did that
when ostentatiously dropping a titbit of information into the ring. ‘I hear about interests from across the Exalsee, instead. Chasme has been getting very bold since their Iron Glove took
over. And there’s the Spiderlands . . .’ He finished up looking directly at Laszlo.
‘What? I don’t work for the Spiderlands.’ The reversal of fortunes made him indignant.
‘Oh, no – just for some Aristoi family or other. I mean, who could work for the whole Spiderlands?’ te Riel put in.
‘I’m . . .’
A freelancer
, but of course everyone said that, and nobody believed it, for all it must be true in many cases. ‘I’m not for the Spiders,’
he finished lamely. ‘Believe me, out of anyone who might have eyes on Solarno, I’m not for
them
.’
There was a shout from outside, and a Fly-kinden woman popped her head around the door, passing a quick word to someone at a nearby table. The Solarnese mob who had been drinking there bolted up
immediately and were out of the door on the instant, and within moments the entire clientele of the Taverna te Remi had gone after them. Nobody knew why or what was happening, whether invasion or a
militia raid or who knew what, but everyone was so jumpy that they were cramming the door in moments, clawing for the outside.
Two streets away, in a little square within sight of the Corta chambers, Laszlo and the others alit on the rooftops to watch a hanging.
Hanging was for traditional Spider-kinden executions, and Solarno was a Spider city at heart: a dozen militia in their plated white leathers had strung up a halfbreed in plain view.
Spider-kinden, of course, could not fly, but it turned out that their victim could, and in the end the spectators were treated to the hideously incongruous spectacle of three soldiers hanging off
the wretch’s legs like men trying to wrestle a kite down in strong winds. Their weight told, though, and abruptly the man’s wings were gone, and the snap of his neck was audible across
the square.
Breighl was bold enough to make enquiries, trusting to his militia contacts to shield him. The dead man had been a spy, he was told. A spy for whom? Nobody seemed to know.
The crowed was dispersing rapidly, most especially those who had come out from the taverna. The square seemed an unhealthy place to be, and Laszlo looked about for te Liss, reaching for her arm.
‘Come on,’ he told her, envisaging a quick jaunt back to his lodgings: wine and safety and an attempt to forget.
That distance between them was still there, though, and a moment later she was inexplicably
with
te Riel: on his arm, an inseparable part of him, as the man looked smugly over at
Laszlo.
The Empire
, Laszlo thought numbly.
The Empire’s coming.
A city-wide tragedy for Solarno, a personal tragedy for himself. Liss, like all freelancers, wanted to end up on the
right side, after all.
There was a wayhouse west of Skiel that was more than it seemed – not one of those disapproved-of-but-tolerated places run by the Way Brothers, but a proper army place, a
regular stopover for soldiers and messengers and Imperial officials. Since the place had found its new purpose, just before the war with the Lowlands started, hundreds of Wasp-kinden had passed
through and never realized that it was a trap.
The trap had remained unsprung all those years, until now.
When the Empire had mounted its invasion of the Commonweal it had gained the attention of the Moth-kinden in a distant kind of way. Most of the Skryres, the arch-magicians who ruled the Moths,
cared nothing for the newly ascendant Apt race, but there had been a few concerned enough about the future to begin planning. Commonweal slaves had flowed into the Empire by the thousand, and some
were recruited by the Arcanum, and some had already been agents, willing to risk the brutal life of a slave out of loyalty to their shadowy masters.
Before the war, Xaraea had worked tirelessly to prepare a few fallback places like this, taking her masters’ vague mandates and making them into hard reality. It had been foreseen, for
example, that the Moths might one day need to capture an Imperial officer of some standing.
Esmail had made good time from the mountains of Tharn. He had not travelled like this for many years, but the habit had not left him. He passed through the countryside – whether Lowlander
or Alliance or Imperial – like a ghost, taking what he needed, sleeping unnoticed in sheds and barns and warehouses, or out under the stars. The spring was cool, but the mountains had been
colder.
He rode on an army automotive for much of the way once he had crossed the Imperial border: nothing but a ghost, unseen, unsuspected, listening to the idle chatter of the Consortium merchants and
their slaves. They spoke of prospects and ambitions, the fortunes of common enemies, the free men and the slaves exchanging banter with a familiarity that they would have curbed instantly had any
officer come near. They spoke of home and families, too, and when they did, Esmail stopped listening.
He did not know whether the Moths would keep their promise, to preserve his wife and children. He did not even know if they were capable of it but, if they had the power, they were still a
subtle and treacherous people. They would dredge up crimes of his ancestors a thousand years old and call any punishment they exacted on him mere justice.
No choice, though. Not with her turning up without warning like that.
Had he known what was coming, he might have risked the cold and the hunters to try and get his family away, but he
had never been a seer. His magical talents lay in other directions.
The wayhouse in question, like most of them, was owned and run by the Consortium. The Beetle-kinden lieutenant in charge never guessed that five of his slaves had been suborned. Indeed, he was
daily impressed by their efficiency. They had lived to please him for years, and solely for this moment.
Three days ago, a Wasp-kinden officer had arrived to spend the night on his way to the capital, and been detained. The slaves had taken him before he had ever reached the wayhouse, ambushing him
on the road, and had kept him in the storage shed ever since. The Beetle-kinden lieutenant, of course, never needed to go into the shed, such was the efficiency of his slaves.
Those same slaves would be gone on the morrow, and their master would never understand why.
It did not escape Esmail’s notice that the capture of this man – this man who would be so extraordinarily important to the Assassin Bug’s immediate future – had happened
after
Esmail had left the phalanstery. One thing the Moths were good at was timing, arranging for the conjunction of what should have been unpredictable events.
The slave that approached him was a lean old Grasshopper-kinden, tall and cadaverous, his grey hair just a fringe about the back of his head. The other conspirators were staying out of
Esmail’s way, in case the Moths had made some mistake, and he ended up helping the Rekef with their inquiries.
It was midnight now. The Beetle lieutenant and his guests were all abed, as were the rest of the staff, as Esmail was led into the storage shed. There, as promised, was a gagged and bound
Wasp-kinden, his pack beside him lying open to display a sheaf of documents.
Esmail knelt next to him, seeing the Wasp’s eyes flare with hatred at this newcomer –
Just some nondescript halfbreed
, was the man’s first thought, no doubt. The
prisoner looked to be a few years short of thirty, but his clothes were finer than mere army-issue would account for, and he had a couple of rings and a torc that all spoke of good family. It was
his face that interested Esmail the most, though: high cheekbones, straight, dark hair worn a little longer than army standard, blue eyes set in that pale skin the Wasps had. Not a bad face, all
told, and it could have been the setting for a great many virtues. Instead of which, of course, it was crawling with so much hate and loathing that there was no room at all for fear.
Esmail leafed through the papers, wondering what he would be taking to Capitas. They were trivial stuff, the sort of humdrum logistics reports that nobody would bother a man of the
captive’s rank and station with: coded messages therefore, but that would not pose a problem.
The captive’s expression said plainly,
I will tell you nothing
, but he had not quite understood his situation or his purpose here.
Esmail took a deep breath, feeling rusty and out of practice. His training was no suitable pursuit for a family man, and he had not been sad to set it aside, either. In the back of his mind,
however, he had always known that he would be calling on these hard-learned skills once again. Spies never really retired, they said, and it was true, whether talking of a Rekef man or a Lowlander
agent or . . . what Esmail was.
The Wasp’s was a good enough face, he reflected again, and he should be grateful for that. It would be more familiar to him than his own soon enough, seen in every mirror, distorted in
every polished piece of armour. He felt its contours, the straight nose, the slightly hollow cheeks, the squared-off chin, that slight nick beneath one ear that was probably a trophy of shaving
rather than a duel. The prisoner had gone very still, and when Esmail reopened his eyes – blue eyes now, not his natural dark ones – the Wasp was trading fear and shock for all the
other expressions he was capable of.