Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Perhaps it will come to us,’ Jodry said thoughtfully. ‘Some place, some mediator, some guarantee of safety. Let me think about it. I’m sure something will spring to mind.’
‘Well, if not, then the armada,’ Stenwold agreed. ‘While you’re racking your brains, spare a thought for our sea defences too.’
After his informant had left the parlour, Helmess Broiler settled down on his couch thoughtfully. ‘Who would have thought . . . ?’ he kept repeating to himself. Elytrya draped herself across the back of the couch and traced her fingertips across his scalp, waiting patiently for him to unpack his thoughts to her.
‘This whole Spiderlands business has taken me quite by surprise,’ he told her eventually. ‘In this life you learn to be wary of apparent good fortune, especially where a Spider is involved. However, perhaps life has finally decided to give back to me some of what Stenwold Maker has taken away.’
‘Perhaps killing that man Failwright was a mistake,’ Elytrya suggested.
‘Apparently not, for they’re blaming the Aldanrael for it, and that makes me a very happy man.’ Helmess poured her some wine. It was a good Spiderlands vintage, and he reckoned that it would be in short supply soon. ‘You had better keep yourself indoors for the moment,’ he added. ‘After all,
I
know you’re no Spider-kinden, but the general populace of Collegium are unlikely to be as enlightened in that particular respect as I am.’
‘So there will be war,’ she observed. ‘You people always seem to be having wars.’
‘Only because Maker insists on dragging us into them,’ Helmess retorted. ‘Well, let him try to drag himself out of this one. He’ll find it won’t be so easy.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Although he has a clever mouth on him, does Maker, and I can’t deny it. I don’t think we can allow him and Teornis to hammer out an accord. That wouldn’t suit us at all, now, would it?’
‘You want your Spider fleet to come sailing into the harbour here, do you?’ she said, gently mocking.
‘Why not? Would a few dozen wooden ships pose any difficulties for your warriors?’
She snorted. ‘Rosander’s Greatclaw-kinden would sink every last one of them before they had any idea what was going on.’
‘Well, then, you may even become the heroes of the hour, until everyone realizes that you’re not stopping with just the Spiders.’ Helmess laughed. ‘We must try to arrange for Maker to be standing front and centre when that happens. Have him hold out his hand in friendship. I want to see Rosander pincer it off at the wrist.’ Abruptly his mood darkened. ‘Or maybe not. Maker’s too clever by half, and he could talk a Fly out of the sky. I think maybe the Spiders should do him in.’
‘That would make sense,’ she agreed. ‘Why should Failwright be the only martyr?’
He laughed at that. ‘Oh, yes, a martyr. I’ll pay for the statue myself, once he’s dead.’
Elytrya studied his expression. ‘And you have a plan.’
‘I may have.’ Helmess nodded. ‘I think I need to set up a meeting, as a concerned and patriotic Assembler of Collegium. Our little informer must needs earn his keep. Go and fetch him back in again, would you?’
She straightened up and glided over to the door, while Helmess’s eyes followed her every move.
I am doing well out of this deal
, he considered. She was no true Spider-kinden but she was as beautiful as they, and with a liquid, sly grace that he actually preferred.
And as duplicitous as any Spider, no doubt, but that just adds to the thrill.
She brought in the neatly dressed young Beetle man, and Helmess addressed him from the couch. ‘Master Cardless.’
Stenwold’s servant gave Helmess a polite little bow. He had proved to be quite the find: a well-educated man who had been dismissed from a good position in Helleron after certain irregularities had turned up in his master’s finances. Bitter and ambitious, he had arrived in Collegium prudently after the war, just when old Maker had been looking for a new servant. Helmess had leant on a few acquaintances to provide Cardless with glowing references, whereupon Maker had taken him on without a thought. Moreover, Helmess was sure that Cardless was an exemplary servant, with not a financial irregularity to be seen. After all, he was now drawing
two
salaries without even having to put a hand into another man’s pocket.
‘I have a job for you, Cardless,’ Helmess informed him. ‘Something a little more than your usual watch-and-report.’
The servant’s stance altered in a way that indicated, though with impeccable politeness, that special duties carried an additional charge.
Helmess smiled sourly.
At least he is predictable in his villainies.
‘Oh, you’ll get yours, don’t worry, but I want you to bring me that Mantis woman you mentioned to me.’
‘Danaen, Master Broiler?’ Cardless wrinkled his nose. ‘That savage?’
‘None other,’ Helmess confirmed. ‘Tell her I’m a concerned citizen that wants to talk about the evil Spiders, and who better than their traditional enemies to set me straight, eh?’
‘Very good, Master Broiler,’ Cardless agreed. His answering smile was superior enough that Helmess decided to take him down a peg.
‘And now you’re asking yourself whether I’ve ever wondered if you’ll sell me back to Stenwold Maker,’ he guessed, seeing the truth of the accusation instantly written across the other man’s face.
‘Master Broiler, I would never—’
‘Save it. I know you,’ Helmess cut him off. ‘Understand this: Stenwold Maker is an honest man, and he’d have no time for a traitor in his own house, confessed or not. The best you’d get out of him then is a kick out the door and a bad reference. You keep doing what I tell you, Cardless, and you’ll profit from it, so don’t get any clever ideas. Now go find me that Mantis-kinden. I’ll see her tomorrow, if you can arrange it.’
After Cardless had gone, Helmess stretched out luxuriously, feeling very pleased with himself.
‘Tomorrow,’ Elytrya asked him, ‘and not tonight?’
‘I prefer to do dark deeds in daylight,’ Helmess murmured. ‘People aren’t expecting them then. Besides, I thought you and I could explore a different branch of villainy tonight, no?’
‘I must say, our Master Maker is rather getting into the spirit of things,’ was Teornis’s remark, when Arianna had finished recounting her news. The Spider lord’s townhouse had changed since she had last seen it. The calibre of his staff was subtly different now: fewer fancily dressed Fly-kinden menials and more obviously armed men. She had spotted at least a half-dozen Kessen Ant-kinden – mercenaries she presumed – standing alert with repeating crossbows in hand, and there were some newcomers as well: arrogant, strutting Dragonfly-kinden wearing armour of chitin and wooden plates. Those on the roof had extravagantly recurved longbows, and those indoors carried single-edged swords. They were an import from some satrapy of the Spiderlands where the Aldanrael held sway.
‘Of course,’ Teornis went on, ‘he’s still a Beetle, plodding and cautious and devoid of style.’ He was sitting at a desk, leafing through papers, and in that looked to Arianna like any Beetle merchant or academic. When he glanced up to meet her gaze, however, she noticed the quirk at the corner of his mouth, and realized he was doing so deliberately for his own amusement.
Or for mine.
Very few outsiders understood that a great deal of what comprised a Spider-kinden was a sense of humour, especially when times were hard. The ability to step on to the scaffold and offer one last jest to the crowd was the mark of a true Aristos.
‘He will agree to meet if terms can be proposed that will satisfy his people.’
‘Meaning the mad Mantis,’ Teornis sighed, and the smile slipped. ‘Whatever terms we baffle Maker into offering, I’ll see her dead. Let them be ignorant savages in their own forests all they want, but when they kill one of my blood, then blood shall follow. They think that they have a sole monopoly on grievance and revenge? Well, I look forward to giving that creature Danaen a
real
reason to hate my kind. I’ll strip her skin off, an inch at a time, and make her eat the flesh of her followers.’ The words were matter-of-factly spoken, his eyes fixed on her face to gauge her reaction.
‘She’s nothing to me,’ Arianna told him. ‘I’m sure she’d kill me in an instant if she thought Stenwold wouldn’t know about it. It wouldn’t matter how loyal I was, or to whom, because to her I’m just another Spider.’
‘It’s Maker’s error to employ such volatile servants,’ Teornis agreed. ‘Well, now, I shall find some convenient place that even the Mantis cannot object to. Let me confront Maker face to face, and we shall see what he will not do to avoid another war. My agents are already abroad in the city, stirring up fear, turning the people’s anger away from our kinden onto their reckless leaders. Soon he’ll accept any terms I offer him just to avoid a riot.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Arianna said, before she thought about it. There was a moment of silence in which Teornis’s expression revealed nothing of his own thoughts.
And so at last I act like something more than a mere servant
, she considered.
You promised me adoption into the family, Teornis. Don’t forget that.
He nodded shortly. ‘You’re right, of course. I do our Master Maker wrong. He’s better than that, and he won’t bend so easily. He listens to that fat fool Drillen, though, and Drillen is just a . . . what are those flying machines? He’s just a great bloated
airship
buoyed up by the opinion of the hoi polloi. Once they turn on him, he’ll soon force Maker’s hand.’
Arianna nodded cautiously. ‘That seems likely.’
And so Jodry Drillen’s life is saved, because his cowardice is more useful to us alive than his death is as a warning.
She found herself surprisingly relieved, having not realized how she had grown so used to the portly Assembler.
‘I will need a little acting out of you, at some point, if things come to it,’ Teornis informed her. ‘Maker has other traits than his plodding to recommend him as an opponent. For a start, he is sentimental. It is a noble quality, perhaps, but a true manipulus should know when to abandon sentiment. If my enemy put a knife to the throat of my sister, or my mother, then I would demonstrate my love of family in the vengeance I took thereafter, not in bending the knee then and there. Maker is not like this, as we have seen.’
Arianna had a sense of what was coming, and shifted uncomfortably.
‘Who does Maker hate most in all the world?’ Teornis asked abruptly.
‘I’d have said it was the Empire, until just a tenday ago. Now maybe it’s you,’ said Arianna, testing how frank she could be with him.
‘Oh, no, no, no. The Empire, always the Empire,’ reprimanded Teornis. ‘The reason he’s so agitated by this current tangle is that it distracts the attention of the city
from
the Empire. He wants
us
as allies, in the end. So he’ll scheme for that, tell us all his tedious rote about common enemies, over and over again. He hates the Empire far more than us, and with good reason. They’re unpleasant fellows, at the best of times, and their manners are even worse than the Beetle-kinden.
But
. . . But he put himself in their hands, of his own free will, for your sake.’
‘That was then.’
‘Oh, my dear, no. He did it then, and he will do it again now, if need be. For you, my dear one, only for you. If Stenwold Maker proves himself devoid of reason, and will not nod his head like a good loser, then it’s time to threaten what he holds dearest: you yourself, – you and only you. Play along, if it comes to that. I know you can.’
And how far will such playing have to go? Will I have to keep acting even while you cut my throat?
But he did not seem to think he was asking anything unusual, just one more deception.
‘Of course,’ she replied.
‘Of course,’ he echoed. ‘But it may not come to that. On the other hand, it may go considerably further.’ Teornis shook his head, looking genuinely regretful. ‘There is one other little duty you may have to shoulder, if things proceed to their worst. I’d rather not impose it on you, and I swear I’ll do what I can to find any other way, but I shall be honest with you in this. You may have to kill him.’
She said nothing, and kept her expression as still as she could.
‘Inelegant, I know,’ he said, apparently in the belief that he was mirroring her thoughts.
I told Stenwold it would not come to that
, she reflected.
To simply eliminate an opponent is graceless, for the Aristoi, until they have ripped everything else from him. But, of course, how better to demonstrate that a man has nothing left, than to have his death come by the hand of the one closest to him? Oh, yes, that would be elegance indeed.
‘I would rather not have you break cover in such a gauche manner,’ Teornis drawled. ‘However, certain circumstances may require it, so I give you fair warning. Stenwold Maker is not the only one who might need to fear violence at our negotiations.’
‘Stenwold wouldn’t—’
‘Oh, surely he himself wouldn’t,’ Teornis agreed, ‘but I want your blade at his throat if anyone in his party
would
.’ Seeing her expression he smiled again. ‘I understand how you must feel about this, my dear, but you perhaps have been living amongst their kind for too long. You have forgotten your true self. When your shell of Beetle-ness has been cast aside, you shall emerge as the pure Spider, I assure you, and such thoughts will no longer trouble you.’