Empire in Black and Gold

Twenty

Stenwold walked carefully into the firelight, and let her see him coming. Totho was still clattering about beneath the automotive, and the Moth’s eyes were closed in what Stenwold hoped was sleep. He sat down, not across from her, not next to her, but at an angle, a no-man’s land. She stared at him sullenly.

‘I think it’s time,’ he said, ‘that I told you some things. About yourself.’

‘You obviously know nothing about me,’ she told him coldly, ‘or you would have realized that I would follow you — you and. . and him — when you went away to talk.’

The world seemed to die around him in that moment, like autumn arriving all in one day.

‘You followed?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you heard?’

‘Everything.’

‘This isn’t how I wanted it, Tynisa.’

‘I’m not sure you even know how you wanted it,’ she told him harshly. ‘Why, Stenwold? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to find out this way? Why not ten years ago? Why not five years ago? Or even two?’

He felt terribly old now. ‘Tynisa, I didn’t tell you because I had not yet told Tisamon.’

‘But you. .’ Her face twisted. ‘So you’d rather. . So I. .’

He held his hand up, and to her credit she let him speak. ‘If I had told you at twelve or fifteen that your father was a Mantis-kinden hired sword working out of Helleron, then I know you would have wanted to meet him, even if it was just to see the man who abandoned your mother. I would have forbidden it, but I do know you, and I know you would have found a way. And if you had confronted him, looking like you do, so like her, he would have killed you. That is nothing more than the truth.’ He rubbed at his forehead. ‘And so I made the resolution to say nothing. I might have broken that resolve, but. . but you never asked. Never. You never asked who your parents were.’

Her expression showed pure betrayal. ‘I didn’t need to ask who they were. I thought. .’ Her voice was starting to shake. ‘I thought that you. .’

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘you couldn’t have thought that.’ Because, of course, that was the gossip when he had arrived at Collegium with a motherless child in his arms: that she was the fruit of some indiscretion of his. It had been a minor scandal. The child’s pale skin had told its tale, though, and when the child grew, it became obvious to all that nothing so heavy and down-to-earth as Beetle blood was flowing in her, and the questions multiplied but the speculation died away, and he had thought that particular rumour must have been put in its grave long before now. But here it was again, and he was confronted with it from its very source.

‘What was I supposed to think?’ she demanded. ‘You raised me. You looked after me.’ The firelight showed tears of pain and frustration tracking down her cheeks. ‘You’re my father. Until last night, that was who you were, to me. I never thought. .’ A sob, choked back. ‘Or if I did, I stopped myself thinking. And now you’re just. . I’m just. .’

‘I did everything I could for you,’ he told her sadly. ‘I did bring you up as if you were my own. It was my promise to Atryssa. I gave you the best start in life that I could think of, in Collegium. I even found a sister for you, so that you would always have company. I did everything but tell you the truth.’

She was silent, it seemed to him, forever, staring into the fire. He felt like a man walking a tightrope, Tisamon to one side and Tynisa to the other. I was never meant forsuch juggling.

‘Tell me about her,’ she said at last. ‘How did it happen? What could have possibly gone wrong, to put me in the world?’

‘Please-’

‘Tell me.’

He settled back. ‘It’s a story you should recognize. We met in Collegium — at the College itself. I know it seems absurd that he,’ a nod towards the solitary Tisamon, ‘could ever have been a student, but he came to Collegium hunting I know not what, something he could not find at home. We were the strangest group. We fought in the Prowess. They were all so good and I was a liability, but they carried me with them.’ The memory hurt more than he would have thought: the sweetness of those innocent days stuck in his throat.

‘What was she like?’ That question, coming from the very mirror of Atryssa? This night did not feel real to him any more.

‘She stepped off a boat into Collegium with nothing but the clothes she wore. Everybody loved her and the city never knew what had hit it. She got everything she asked for. I think she was from one of the great Spider houses, the Aristoi they call them. But they had fallen on hard times, lost their footing in the dance. She didn’t speak much about it, never looked back. She was Spider-kinden, after all. She could do all the things that they do, intrigue with the best of them, but. . she had a heart, and she was a friend, and I think we all loved her, just a little. Your mother.’ The sun had been so much brighter then, in his memories. It had shone every day. Debates in the chambers, duels at the Prowess, learning artifice from the masters. As a young man, with the world ahead of him and no worries, none.

‘As for Tisamon, he came from Felyal, where the real fanatics live. He hated her race. He hated her, at first. Even then he was the best fighter anyone had ever seen, but she herself was close on the second. They would duel together in the Prowess Forum all the time. Each one could find no other to challenge their skills. She gave him something no other could, and he came to love her even as they fought. Mantis-kinden! And when they love and hate, it is with all their being. And he hated himself, at first, because he thought he was betraying his own race. Oh it was a difficult business. And yet your mother worked on him, and broke his defences down.’ He reached around for his pack, opened it up. ‘I’ve something I should show you, I think, at this point. It’s been a long time waiting for you to see it. I’ve carried it to many places. Coming to Helleron, I thought. . well, there was always a chance.’ He withdrew a flat leather wallet and opened it to reveal a canvas perhaps a foot across. With great care he folded it out so that she could see.

Two decades ago the fashion in painting groups was to have them surprised in some domestic scene. So it was that the five figures here were in a taverna somewhere, turning to look at the viewer as though suddenly interrupted in some drinking discussion. The paint had scuffed, in places, flaked and chipped, but the picture was still clear. Tynisa stared.

Seated left of centre was a young Beetle who could have been Stenwold’s son, save that he had never had one. Still stocky, slightly round at the waist. She looked from that cheerful, smiling face to the solemn one the fire now danced on, trying to bridge the chasm time had made.

Standing behind his chair was Tisamon: there was no doubt of that. The artist had caught him perfectly, down to the hostile expression on his sharp features, a threat to the intruder. His right hand, almost out of sight behind Stenwold’s chair, wore the metal gauntlet of his folding claw. In the far left of the picture, a bald, knuckle-faced Fly leant back in his chair, a bowl of wine tilted in one hand, seemingly on the very point of overbalancing. Across from him was a darkly serious Ant-kinden man, his back turned three-quarters to the viewer, the links of his chain-mail hauberk picked out in minute detail.

In the centre of the picture, sitting on the table with her legs dangling, was a girl whose face Tynisa had herself watched grow from a child’s to a woman’s, in daily mirrored increments. At that point — in the frozen piece of time the artist had preserved — it was as though it was she herself amongst those strangers.

The picture was signed, ‘Nero’, in small strokes.

‘Tisamon — and me, of course,’ Stenwold said, seeing even as he said it that there was no ‘of course’ about his younger image. ‘That’s Nero himself, the one with the wine. He had a trick with mirrors, to paint his own image in. Nero lives still, usually trawling around the south, Merro, Egel and Seldis. The Ant is Marius. He. . died. And of course, that’s Atryssa. The most beautiful woman I ever knew.’ He found himself looking from the painted likeness to the living one. ‘I had thought that your father’s blood would show but, as you grew, year by year, you were more like her. No mother could give her child a greater gift.’

‘Except to stay with her,’ said Tynisa sadly. ‘Tell me the rest, Stenwold. I have to know.’

‘And we went our ways. Marius went back to Sarn and the army. I stayed at Collegium. Your mother and father made a living as duellists, out Merro way. I was early, perhaps even the first, to discover what was raising its head up east of the Lowlands. I followed my researches and they led me to the Empire. I called for my friends and they came, even though Marius had to leave his beloved city for me. We agreed to work against the Wasps. We saw some of their plans, and we knew that the Lowlands were just another point on the map for them, another place to conquer. You’ve heard of the city of Myna, and you know what happens next. It seemed destined to fall beneath the Empire’s boot, so we agreed to regroup there and see if the Wasps could be stopped before its gates. Nero dropped out — Fly-kinden always know the best time to make an exit. The rest of us. . When we met, Atryssa wasn’t there. And then we were betrayed. The defenders of Myna were betrayed. It seemed that only one of us could have done it. And Atryssa wasn’t there. It broke Tisamon, or nearly. Because he had loved her, in spite of everything he believed about her people.’

For a moment Stenwold could not go on. The sound of a city dying was still in his mind. He remembered the citizens of Myna out in the streets, Wasp soldiers coursing overhead, the breaking of the gates: the bitter taste of failure and betrayal. He remembered the desperate fight on the airfield. Marius’s soldiers retreating, shields held high. Marius calling. Marius, dying in the orthopter. The grief and rage and loss that had become Tisamon’s whole world.

‘Marius died as we fled Myna, and if I hadn’t stopped him, Tisamon would have got himself killed as well.’

‘But she didn’t betray you?’

‘To this day I do not know who did, save that, after all this time, I know it was none of my friends,’ Stenwold replied. ‘But it was too late, then. Too late for Marius. Too late for Atryssa. Too late for all of us.’ The end of his golden days. The shadows gathering. Tisamon was right: Stenwold had become what he had despised. He had gone on to set himself against an Empire, and he had made his students his pawns, and some of them had suffered, and some of them had died.

‘What am I supposed to do now?’ Tynisa asked him. ‘Knowing this, with him? Help me, I feel like I’m losing my world.’

He reached out and she took his hand gratefully. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘what am I? I thought I was yours, and now I’m just some. . mistake? Some cast-off?’

‘No!’ he said quickly. ‘Tynisa, listen to me. Don’t ever think that you were not meant. She told me, close to the end. She told me of her last night with Tisamon, before we split up. Before Myna. She had her precautions, like any woman in her position, but that last night — she felt it might really be their last night. She let it happen. She loved him, and she wanted to bear his child.’

When she folded herself into his arms, he held her and wondered if it would feel different if she had genuinely been his daughter.

‘And what now?’ she whispered.

‘He will not come to you,’ he told her, ‘because he does not know how. But that still means you can go to him when you are ready.’ And in response to her half-heard correction, ‘Yes, if. If you are ready.’

He had expected some burden to lift from him at this point, but the crushing weight of his responsibilities piled higher on him, and he knew he would never be free of them.

His place was always away from the fire. Moth-kinden were born and raised in cold places, and he did not need its light. Achaeos’s eyes, the blank white eyes of all of his people, knew neither night nor darkness.

The others were still arguing, the fat Beetle and his Spider girl. Achaeos had not even tried to follow their conversation. It was clearly some tawdry domestic business that had sprung up between them and the Mantis, and it was therefore beneath his notice. The other one, the loathsome machine-fumbler, would be either asleep or worshipping the stinking, groaning monster they were forcing him to ride in. Achaeos shuddered at the thought. The motion of it made him feel ill, the sight of its moving parts turned his stomach.

After the distraction of their bickering gave way to a need for sleep he reached for his bones and crouched down to cast them, as was the old habit. What did it matter what they said, when his destiny was out of his hands already? They had looked at him as though he was unsound, the Arcanum back in Helleron. He was drifting from them, from what they expected of him.

The bones fell amongst patchy grass. He grimaced and poked about, moving the blades aside to try to determine what pattern they made, but it had no sense to it. It seemed to be promising absurdly catastrophic things, far beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or even ‘life’ or ‘death’. He decided that the uneven ground had fouled the divination and gathered them up again. With care he cleared a decent patch of ground, plucking the grass away, rubbing the ground flat. He was going to far too much effort now, just to satisfy his habit, but it had become a point of pride. He took a breath and cast the bones again.

For a long time he remained very still, studying them. It was a pattern he had never seen before, outside the books — the old books, that was. If he had not researched his pastime so keenly, he might never have recognized what the world was telling him.

They gave one word to it, in those old books, and that word was ‘Corruption.’ To the Moths it had its own meaning, as everything did. It did not mean the bribery and material greed of the Beetle-kinden. It meant the rotting of the soul, the very worst of the old dark magics.

He shook himself. He was a poor seer, no great magician he. He was in no position to make these dire predictions. I have misread the sign, or miscast the bones. He reached for them again, to gather them up, and drew his hand back with a startled hiss. They had burned when he touched them and, as he watched, they were blackening, pitting. The scent of decay came to him, and he finally knew what they had been trying to say.

He almost fell into the fire, he was so desperate to reach Stenwold Maker. The man was asleep, but Achaeos did not care. He took hold of a heavy shoulder and shook it, and heard a whisper as Stenwold began groping immediately for his sword.

‘What. . What is it? What?’ he muttered. ‘Are we under attack?’

‘I have to speak to you, now,’ Achaeos almost spat at him.

‘What?’ Stenwold paused and then stared at him. ‘I know it doesn’t bother your people, but it’s the middle of the night.’ He looked haggard, ten years older.

Achaeos looked around at the others, most of whom were at least half awake by now. Tisamon, truly on watch, was staring at him keenly, blade already bared. ‘Come away from the fire and talk,’ Achaeos insisted.

Stenwold cursed and got to his feet, bulging blanket wrapped around him, and his sword still in his hand. He looked just like a bad actor playing a comic hero. They removed from the fire enough that their talk would not disturb the others, though still under Tisamon’s harsh gaze.

‘You’re going east,’ Achaeos said.

Stenwold rubbed his eyes with the forearm of his sword hand. ‘Achaeos, that’s not exactly news.’

‘You do not know what is east, of here.’

‘The Empire’s east, Achaeos. Asta’s east. Szar’s east, and Myna, and then Sonn, and eventually you get to Capitas and you meet the Emperor. Of all the Beetles in the world, you don’t need to tell me what lies east.’

‘The Darakyon is east. East and close,’ Achaeos said urgently.

Stenwold just looked at him. ‘You mean the forest? What’s that to you? Your people don’t live there, do they? I didn’t think even the Mantis-kinden lived there.’

‘Nobody lives there. Nobody travels there who has any sense. The Darakyon is evil.’ Achaeos clutched at Stenwold’s blanket-cape. ‘Terrible things were done there.’ He sensed, rather than heard, Tisamon’s stance shift.

Stenwold continued to peer at him, tired and irritable and mired in his own difficulties. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said shortly. ‘I have other things to worry about than the beliefs of your people.’ He shook off Achaeos’s hand and returned towards the fire. The Moth watched him go with bared teeth.

So fly! he thought. Fly away from this fool and his mission. But he could not, and he almost wept in frustration at it, at the invisible chains that were keeping him here.

There was a seat for the driver at the front of each automotive, and room for just one more sitting beside him, beneath the shade of a rough canvas roof. Thalric was the extra one in the lead vehicle but he was reflecting that it was a remarkably uncomfortable way to travel even so. His own men and the slavers were sitting along the open sides of the vehicle, exposed to the dust, and he was beginning to wonder if the slaves, confined in their cage, didn’t have the better deal of it.

He considered his earlier conversation with Cheerwell Maker, and decided that he had lost control of it. It was not just her jibe at the end, however well aimed. He had indulged himself: he had wasted time in boasts about the Empire that he felt so fiercely about. Strutting before a young woman, honestly! Still, perhaps he had given her sufficient food for thought. They were nearly at Asta now. If she decided to stick, then there were people there who would loosen her.

Or perhaps he could pass her over to Brutan. He considered the slaver’s likely response to the gift and realized that he found it distasteful, but that was not for any reason that would have satisfied Miss Maker. As an individual, the slavers’ habits irked him primarily because they were running their operation for their own sordid enjoyment, and that was not the Empire’s way. As a servant of the Empire, however, he knew it all served, in the end. The Brutans of this world were most slaves’ first introduction to imperial policy, and that was a hard but necessary lesson. They had to be shown that they had no right and no appeal. Any slave who could say, ‘You can’t do that to me,’ was not a slave.

There was a thump on the roof of the cab, and a moment later someone put their head down into Thalric’s field of vision, annoying the driver beside him. It was a Fly-kinden man in the uniform of the Scout Corps.

‘Message for you, sir,’ the Fly reported.

‘Well?’

‘Care to join me up top, sir?’

Thalric narrowed his eyes, but the Fly was silhouetted against the outside glare and his expression could not be read. With a hiss of annoyance Thalric pushed himself out of the side of the cab, grabbing at rungs while flickering his Art-wings to keep him stable. The Fly was sitting cross-legged atop the wagon when Thalric reached him, forward enough that he was out of earshot of the other men.

‘This had better be important.’

‘You’re summoned, Major. Report to the quartermaster’s in Asta after sunset tonight.’

‘Summoned? Who by?’ Thalric caught up. ‘Major, is it?’

‘Yes, Major. I’ll look for you there, sir.’ In an instant the Fly kicked off into the air, letting the passing breeze catch him. His wings sparked to life and he was off.

Major? Major meant Rekef business. Thalric was a captain in the Imperial Army, but the Rekef gave out its own ranks. Despite the dust and the heat he felt a queasy chill inside him. Rekef Inlander seemed most likely — investigating him? He had done nothing wrong. He had been telling the truth when he professed to Cheerwell Maker his unbending loyalty. Still, he knew that, to catch all treason and malfeasance in the Empire, the Rekef machine had to grind small and thorough, and innocents would always get caught up in the teeth of the wheels. Of course he would make the sacrifice willingly, if the Empire demanded it. It was just that he would rather not have to.

Che could no longer dispute that they were approaching somewhere. Where there had been scrubby wildland, now there was a packed-dirt road that the slave wagons were churning up with their tracks. Che and Salma had been given some time now to watch the other travellers, those passing in the opposite direction and those the slave convoy overtook. The sight was not encouraging.

They saw squads of soldiers, mostly. Many were heading west. Others were returning patrols, slogging wearily through the dust with spears sloped against their shoulders. Occasionally a messenger would thunder past on horseback, or the shadows of flying men would pass over the prisoners’ cage.

‘Where is there, out here?’ Che wondered. The Lowlander cartographers had never been much for going beyond the borders of the lands they knew. It was part of the inward-looking mindset that was now giving the Wasps such free rein.

‘Commonweal maps don’t go into much detail here. Just “wildlands”, that kind of thing,’ said Salma. ‘Mind you, they’re mostly about a hundred years out of date at the least. It’s been a while since the Monarch’s Nine Exploratory Heroes were sent to the four corners of the world looking for the secrets of eternal life.’

‘The who sent for what?’ she asked incredulously. He grinned at her. She had noticed a difference in him, after her return from Thalric’s tent, and after his concern for her had been allayed. When she had pressed him on it, he had eventually admitted this gem of knowledge that he had mined in her absence.

‘Her name,’ he had revealed, ‘is Grief in Chains.’

And she had stared at him, and then remembered the Butterfly-kinden dancer who had so fascinated him. ‘What sort of a name is that?’ she had asked, nettled. She had always had a chip on her shoulder about her own name.

‘Oh, they change their names a lot, Butterflies,’ he admitted. ‘Still, don’t you think it’s nice?’

And there had been a little extra life in him, from then on, something his own chains could not drag down. Now he was grinning at her and she could not tell whether he was being truthful or not. ‘Three centuries ago the Monarch was very old, and he sent the nine greatest heroes of the Commonweal out into the unexplored parts of the world, because his advisors and wizards had told him that the secret of life eternal was out there to be found. Some went north across the great steppe, through the Locust tribes and the distant countries of fire and ice, and the ancient, deserted mountain kingdoms of the Slugs. Some went east where the barbarians live, and where the broken land is studded with cities like jewels, or to where the great forests of the Woodlouse-kinden grow and rot all at the same time. Some went west, and sailed across the seas to distant lands where wonders were commonplace and the most usual things were decried as horrors not to be tolerated. And some,’ and here his smile grew mocking, ‘went south across the Barrier Ridge, and found a land where no two people can agree on anything, and the civilized comforts of a properly measured life were almost completely unknown. And five of the Exploratory Heroes returned, with empty hands, but with tales enough to keep the Regent’s wise men debating for centuries.’

She was agog, just for a moment, waiting. ‘And? What about the others? Did they find it?’

He laughed at her. ‘Nobody knows. They never came back. Some people still say, though, that the last of the Heroes still wanders distant lands, living eternally, eternally young, trying only to get his prize back to a Monarch who died just two years after the Heroes set out.’

Che tried to appear unimpressed. ‘Your people are very strange. Are all those places real?’

He shrugged carelessly. ‘They’re on the maps, for what it’s worth. What about your maps?’

‘Oh, commerce. Merchants go everywhere and sell to everyone. Our maps have the caravan routes picked out in red. We have treaties and trade deals. We like pieces of paper with signatures on them. But most of all we expect people to come to us, since Collegium is the centre of the world as far as we’re concerned. I’ll tell you about Doctor Thordry,’ she said. ‘That should explain the Collegium attitude to explorers, anyway.’ And she did so, spinning the tale out for as long as she could, aware that the other slaves in the cage, piqued by Salma’s dismissive words, were all listening now.

Thordry had been an artificer of a century ago, around the very beginnings of man-made flight. He and his manservant had set out in a flying machine of his own invention and they had gone south, across the sea. It had been an ingenious piece of work, his machine. Che had seen it, even run her hands along the brass-bound wood of its hull in the Collegium Museum of Mechanical Science. An airship with a clockwork engine that Thordry and his companion had wound each day by letting out a weight on a cord, which they had then hauled in by hand.

Thordry had been gone and almost forgotten for five years when he had surfaced again. He came back with maps and stories of lands across the sea, none of which were believed and some of which were simply unbelievable. He had spent two years wandering as a self-appointed, itinerant ambassador for Collegium, and then set sail for home. His navigation skills, and ill winds, had landed him up in the Spiderlands, and he had spent a further year there as a fashionable talking point before seeing that his popularity was on the wane, and setting off for home.

But on his arrival, the triumphant explorer had not received the reception he had been expecting. He had not been laughed at, quite, but the Great College virtually ignored him, and to the populace he was a celebrated lunatic. His stories of distant lands were treated as just that, stories. When they were printed it was as The Marvellous and Fantastical Adventures of Doctor Thordry and his Man. His maps, that connected with no land known, were quietly shelved.

‘And that,’ Che finished, ‘is how Lowlanders treat explorers. Which is why we have an Empire on our doorstep that’s sharpening its swords as we speak, and yet everyone’s talking very loudly amongst themselves to block out the sound of it.’

‘Helleron can’t exactly fool itself. Helleron must have sold half the weapons that were used against my own people in the war,’ Salma said, and she snorted.

‘Oh, I think we’ve seen quite enough of Helleron and the Empire in bed together,’ she said bitterly, and to her surprise there was a current of agreement among the other slaves.

There might even have been a dialogue, then, the start of community between them. The reminders of their state were never far away, though. Even at that moment the slaver automotive passed another string of luckless captives. It was a caravan of the taloned, white-skinned race that someone identified as Scorpion-kinden. They had a string of pack-mules, and a pair of mule-sized scorpions loaded with baggage, but the pick of their trading stock was trudging along, tied to the end of their chain of animals. They were gaunt, malnourished, coated with dust, their clothes gone to rags that could not hide their lash-marks. Che tried to decide if they were escapees or criminals or honest men and women, but she realized soon enough that all they were was slaves.