Empire in Black and Gold

Thirty-four

The Wasps had come to Helleron. At first Stenwold thought the city was under siege, for from the east they saw only the tents of the Empire’s soldiers, their gold-and-black barred flags and armoured automotives. Even as they watched, an orthopter in imperial colours ghosted down silently, wings spread to catch the air.

They approached carefully, circling to the south, and from there it became apparent that matters were very different.

There was a very sizeable Wasp encampment outside Helleron, all the men and materials that Stenwold had already guessed at, but beyond them the city went on about its business just the same. There were caravans of goods, roads cluttered with people, the perpetual entrances and exits that turned the money mills of Helleron. The same tent city of traders, foreign buyers, slave markets and hawkers took up where the Wasps left off and yet nobody seemed to care that there were two thousand soldiers from an enemy power camped at the wall-less gates.

‘They have surrendered,’ Achaeos said bitterly. ‘The moment the Wasp army got here, they laid down their weapons.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Stenwold said. ‘What we’re seeing here is not an occupied city. Look, people coming and going as they please, no guards, no sentries or militia. This is Helleron just as it always was.’

‘A thousand Wasps don’t just turn up here to see the sights or go to the theatre,’ Tynisa said.

‘Our answers will be found inside,’ Stenwold decided. ‘We have to meet with Scuto.’

It was strange, entering that city again, for it held so many memories. Flight and fight for Tynisa and Totho, betrayal and capture for Che. Tisamon must be recalling his countless mercenary duels, all those years counted out in meaningless exercise of his skills. Achaeos tugged his cowl over his face and hid his hands. There were a few Moth-kinden in Helleron, but they were despised.

There were Wasps, too, within the crowd. Not many, and doing nothing more than talking to traders or passing on their way, but there they were. They were in armour, in uniform, rubbing shoulders in the weapon markets with Ant-kinden who regarded them suspiciously. Wasp quartermasters could be seen taking up provisions for their men, while Wasp artificers debated with Beetle machine-smiths over the quality of their wares. None of them spared a glance for the incoming train of riders. It was all so strangely unreal.

Stenwold found them stabling for the horses and paid over the high prices Helleron demanded, and then they went to seek out the poor quarter of the city where Scuto had his home.

‘I don’t understand it any more than you,’ the Thorn Bug said. He was perched on a bench in his workroom, with quite a crowd there. Stenwold and his companions had been joined by almost a score of others who were obviously Scuto’s agents within the city. They were a motley and disparate pack of rogues, Che decided: Beetles, Flies and Ants, halfbreeds, an elegant Spider-kinden in fine silks, even a scarred Scorpion-kinden whose left hand was now just a two-pronged hook of metal.

‘They arrived here, what, a tenday ago, bit by bit, and they’re still trickling in. As my lads can tell you, there was a real panic at first. The magnates all mobilized their retinues, and the Council hired every mercenary they could put their hands on. It was knife-edge stuff all the way for a day or so, but the stripeys, they just sat there outside, pitching their tents. Then word got out that it was something else they were here for, but not the fighting. Some news arrived from the south saying there was an army marching on Tark that made this bunch look like the boys who clean the dunnies. Then the word was that this lot were only here to buy. They had pots of gold, Helleron mint and their own tat coins, and they were after weapons, supplies, all sorts of kit. Some reckoned they were going north — to go kick the Commonweal again maybe. People was talking maybe like they could be hired, as a mercenary army. They wanted to send them against Tharn, and this lad’s folk.’

Achaeos, silent and pale, looked from Stenwold to Scuto’s grotesque features.

‘And that’s all I know and there they are. There’s been some fighting, mostly Tarkesh Ants having a go at them. They ain’t exactly shy about drawing blood, the Waspies, but they pay out in good coin when the Council of Magnates asks ’em to. And there they sit, making the city rich, and here we sit, wondering what the plague the buggers really want.’

‘I’m missing something here.’ Stenwold looked down at his fists. ‘We all are. There’s no help for it but I need to talk to the Magnates.’

‘It’s not like they’ll listen to a word you’ve got to say, chief,’ Scuto put in helpfully.

‘The Council as a whole, no, but there are a couple of them who know me of old. They owe me favours. I’m not saying they’ll take that as seriously as Tisamon here might, but it still counts for something, and information’s free to give. In the meantime, all of you, spread your nets as wide as you can. I want to know what the Empire is after. Helleron could depend on it. The entire Lowlands could depend on it.’

He turned to his own band as Scuto hopped off the bench and began giving out orders. ‘We still have our parts to play, now or later. So I want most of you to stay here, wait for me, until the picture’s clear.’

‘But you want me to go to my people?’ said Achaeos.

‘I do indeed. Will you speak for me?’

‘I will not.’ The Moth folded his arms. ‘I will speak for the truth, though, and that will serve you just as well. I am not your agent, Stenwold Maker.’

‘Then don’t do it for me, and certainly don’t do it for Helleron. Do it for the Lowlands, Achaeos. Do it for your own people, by all means, but the Moths were a wide-sighted people once and surely they can be so again. They must see that, piecemeal, we are all food for the Empire, to fall beneath her armies, be taken up by her slavers. There are a hundred age-old slights that draw their boundaries across the Lowlands. Your people hate mine. Tisamon’s hate the Spider-kinden. The Ant city-states hate one another. If we cannot stitch these wounds together, even for a little while, then we will fall.’

Achaeos, who had obviously had a snide remark already poised, thought better of it. ‘You are right, of course,’ he said. ‘I shall go to my people and tell them all I can. I am no great statesmen of theirs, no leader, but whatever I can move with my words, it shall be moved.’

And it seemed that he was finished, and Stenwold was turning away from him, until he said, ‘And I wish your niece Cheerwell to come with me.’

Scuto’s voice still sounded in the background, parcelling out wards and fiefs of the city to his men. About Stenwold and Achaeos, though, the Moth’s words echoed loudly.

‘No!’ Totho shouted. By sheer instinct he had his sword half out of his scabbard, and that changed everything. Tisamon was instantly on guard, his clawed glove on his hand, and Tynisa found she had half-drawn along with him. Stenwold was holding his hands up, aware that Scuto had stuttered into silence, staring at them.

‘It is out of the question,’ he said to Achaeos. ‘How could you even ask such a thing?’

‘Because it will help,’ Achaeos said. ‘Since I am to tell them that they must aid your folk for the good of us all, I wish to present her to the elders of my race, Master Maker. It will help. They must see her.’

‘You can’t even begin to think about it!’ snapped Totho. ‘Not Che, not any of us!’

‘They’ll kill her,’ put in Tynisa.

‘They will not,’ Achaeos said. ‘Do you really think we know nothing of hospitality? Do not judge us by the laws of this forsaken place. If I bring her to Tharn with me she will be safe. Welcome, I cannot guarantee, but safe she will be.’

‘The answer is still no,’ said Stenwold firmly. ‘No more debate on this. I will not risk my niece-’

‘Uncle Sten.’ At last Che’s voice broke in, and it had enough steel in it that they all stopped and looked when she spoke. ‘Do you remember the last time you tried to keep me from harm?’

He stared at her, thinking of that long chain of happenstance that had taken her from the Sky Without to the cells of Myna. ‘Are you saying that you. . want to go?’

Che swallowed, balling up her courage. ‘You have been a scholar, Uncle, among many other things. Tell me how many of our kinden have walked through the halls of the Moths? Do you know of any, in this day and age?’

‘Che, you cannot know, none of us can know, what might befall you there. Every place has rules of hospitality, and I mean no insult now when I say that every place breaks those rules from time to time.’

‘I trust Achaeos,’ she said. ‘And if I can do something to help, rather than just sit here and hide my head, I’ll do it. You don’t know, Uncle Sten, what I have been through since we parted at Collegium. I’ve been a fugitive and I’ve fought, I’ve been a slave and a prisoner. I’ve been on a torturer’s table and I’ve even struck Wasp officers. I’m not just Cheerwell the student who needs to be kept out of harm’s way. I’m going with him. I’m doing my part.’

Stenwold gave out a huge sigh that spoke mostly of the way the wheel of the years had turned while he had been looking elsewhere. He heard Totho insist, ‘You can’t let her!’ but even he knew that by then the matter was out of his hands.

‘Go,’ her uncle told her. ‘But take all care you can. You’re right. Though you’re still my niece, my family, you are a soldier in this war, and risk is a soldier’s constant companion.’

After nightfall Achaeos took Che out of the city by the quickest way, and then around its periphery, anxious to remain in Helleron’s shadow as little as possible. Soon they were passing the massive construction yards that were labouring over the last stretches of the Helleron-Collegium rail line — the Iron Road as they called it — which pounded out their metal rhythm every hour of day and night to get the job done.

Then they were heading towards the mountains. Outdoors, Che’s vision faltered after a distance, so that the ground before her feet was lit in shades of grey, but the mountains beyond still loomed as black, star-blotting shapes.

They had been on the move for some hours now, and they had no equipment with them for scaling such slopes. Even if Achaeos knew some secret path up to his home, Che was not sure she would be able to make it.

‘We may have to rest at the foothills,’ she warned him.

He did not seem to react at first, but seemed to be looking for some specific place in the scrubby, rising terrain. If she looked to the north and the east, Che could see the lights of the mining operations, Elias Monger’s amongst them no doubt. She wondered if Achaeos’s people would be raiding again tonight, and who had now inherited Elias Monger’s share.

‘We will be there later tonight,’ said Achaeos. It was already dusk.

‘I don’t think I can manage that.’

He turned at last, his pale eyes gleaming in her vision. ‘You cannot fly, can you? I know that some Beetles can.’

‘Few, very few, and that only badly,’ she confirmed. ‘I would. . I would so like to fly and I wouldn’t care how clumsy I might look. I’ve not been good with the Art, though. I only started seeing in the dark after the. . after I dreamed. .’ She had to force herself to say it. ‘After you spoke to me that night, before we reached Myna.’

‘You have more skill than you guess,’ he said. ‘Beetles endure; even my people know that. Think what you have already endured, and tell me your Art did not help you. However, you will not need to fly to Tharn. Simply find me a little brush that is dry enough to burn, and I will summon some transportation.’

‘Summon? Is this more magic?’ she asked him.

‘I would prefer to say yes, and take the credit, but, no, this is a mere trick.’

When they had enough suitable material to burn, he began to lay it out in a pattern that she was too close to make out, lighting each pile of dry grass and broken wood in turn until they were surrounded by an irregular ring of small fires. A shiver ran down Che’s spine: despite his words this felt like magic to her.

And then she felt something in the sky. Felt, not heard, for it made no sound, but the wingbeats were enough to make the fires dance and the warmed air gust across her. She reached out for Achaeos and clutched his sleeve as the stars above them went dark with the passage overhead of some enormous winged thing.

And then it dropped lower, and her eyes caught it in all its pale majesty. It was a moth, no more, no less, but as it circled down towards them she saw that its furry body was larger than that of a horse, its wingspan awesome, each wing as long as six men laid end to end. It had a small head, eyes glittering amongst the glossy fur behind frondlike antennae that extended forward in delicate furls. As it landed, the sweep of its wings extinguished most of their little fires.

‘We of Tharn cannot always fly so high. We are sometimes weary — or injured, of course.’ He grinned at her. ‘This was to be my plan after I left the stables where you met me, but other things then intervened.’ With a smooth movement and a flash of his own wings he was up on the great creature’s back, holding out a hand for her to join him.

She walked up to the moth’s side, behind the enormous sweep of its wingspan, putting a hand on its thick fur, feeling a warmth within that most of the great insects lacked. She took Achaeos’s hand and, with his help, clambered up onto the creature’s back. It shifted briefly on its six legs, adjusting to the extra weight. There was no saddle, she saw, but there were cords run from somewhere amongst its mouthparts, and Achaeos had clutched these like reins.

‘You must hold on tight,’ he said, and she put her arms about his waist and did her best to grip with her knees.

He made some signal with the reins and, in a single lurching movement, the moth flung itself airborne.

In that moment Che was sure she was going to slide off, bound back from the powering wing and then tumble to the ground however far below. She clutched at Achaeos so desperately that she could feel the hard line ridging his side where her stitches still held.

Then she began to anticipate the rhythm of the insect’s flying, and it was not as she had expected. Instead of the manic fluttering, the almost random blundering of its little brothers, the giant’s wings had a slow and sombre beat, each downturn propelling the moth forwards and upwards into the air, It was a patient and tireless rhythm that reminded her of being out in a rowing boat with Stenwold once, when she was very young, with her uncle pulling on the oars with his unfailing strength. She slowly loosened her hold on Achaeos so that he could breathe again, and looked about her.

She was too far from the ground to see more than the red lights of Helleron’s distant forges, too far out from the mountain to detect its slopes. Above there were only stars. Achaeos and the moth and herself were the only other bright things in the world, coursing through the cool, still air, higher and ever higher. She leant her head on Achaeos’s shoulder. It was so silent up here. The insect’s wings made no sound, and the flight was gentle enough for there to be no rushing of air in her ears. It was so different from the fixed-wing she had piloted, or the ponderous bulk of the Sky Without or the Wasps’ clattering heliopter.

How wonderful it would be to fly like this, she thought. Ever since childhood she had coveted this moment, that was being given to her now so casually. She could not say why she craved it, for Stenwold could not fly, nor could Tynisa. Che had often looked out of her bedroom window at the clouds or the stars, and at Fly-kinden messengers on their frantic errands or slow-droning fliers coming in towards the airfield, and she had known that here was something she would always want, and never have.

And then the slopes of the mountain came into sight, and she realized that she was now seeing Tharn.

She had pictured, perhaps, houses built slantwise on the slopes, or even caves carved into them. She had known the Moth-kinden were an ancient people, and that these places that were their last homes had also been their first. That fact had never meant much to her until now.

The lowest slopes that she could see were cut into steps that were tens of yards wide, deep with waving crops, where water trickled from one artificial plateau to the next in delicate, dividing streams. Here and there were shacks and huts for the fieldhands, but this was not Tharn. Instead Che could see Tharn on the upper slopes. For a sheer height of over one hundred yards the side of the mountain had been worked into a city.

They met in a darkened room again, the back room of some dingy Beetle hostelry where the guests were obliged to bring their own lamps. Thalric was glad of that, anyway. He had no wish to see his own face leering at him out of the gloom.

The figure that was Scylis found a chair by barely more than starlight, but then Spider-kinden always had good eyes, Thalric knew. He heard more than saw the other man pour a bowl of wine and sip a little.

‘Progress?’ he said impatiently.

Scylis swallowed and made a disappointed noise. ‘Abysmal vintage, this. Given my current short commons I’d ask you to find something better, but I’m afraid your people’s taste in wine is even worse.’

Thalric hissed through his teeth. ‘Time is short, Scylis.’

‘I know it is, Major, but never fear, all is in hand. I’m well in with Stenwold’s divided little band. With this face I’m closer to Stenwold than his shadow.’

‘I thought you were intending to go all the way with them disguised as Khenice.’

‘I didn’t think that would convince, and in my position the least suspicion can be fatal. So I found a better opportunity — a perfect opportunity that fell right in my lap. They had so much on their minds that they never wondered why poor Khenice left them without saying goodbye.’

‘Who?’ A cold feeling came over Thalric, though he was hard put to place it. ‘Whose. . face are you now wearing?’

‘My secrecy is my life, Major. Do you think I would trust you with my life? Would you trust me with yours?’

‘Then what have you got for me?’

‘You’ve been admirably patient this last year, Major, in putting your plans into operation. Now you’re like a child who has been promised a toy. Very well. I will show you where Stenwold’s man has his den. He has mustered quite a force of malcontents there. You should, I think, move on them. Use local muscle if you’re worried about the look of it. Thirty decent fighters should do it.’

‘Hiring thirty men without word spreading will be difficult.’

‘I leave that in your capable hands,’ Scylis said. ‘You won’t catch all of them, because about half are out on errands at any given time. I will leave you details of where and to whom, for those I know about. A few will slip past, but you’ll at least cut off the head. The top man is a spiky little grotesque called Scuto. Kill him, if you can. Kill all of them, if you can.’

‘And what about you? If you won’t tell me who you’re dressed up as, you could get caught in the middle.’

‘If that happens then I deserve to be,’ Scylis said dismissively. ‘Let me look after that. I’m very good at it.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They’re hoping the Moth-kinden hermits will help them out. I can sour that, I think.’

Thalric nodded. ‘We’ve already sent men to them. They’re now in hand.’

‘I wonder.’

‘You doubt me?’ Thalric asked.

‘I doubt your understanding,’ said Scylis. ‘They’re not just mountain savages, you know. They’re a clever pack of quacksalvers, the Moths, and nobody ever quite knows what they’re after. I would make them a priority, if I were you, since they are adept at breaking up just the sort of plans you are relying on.’

‘Then do it,’ he said. ‘Prevent any alliance with the Moths, by whatever means.’

‘And Stenwold Maker?’

‘Can you take him alive?’

‘Probably not, as things stand.’

Thalric considered. ‘I have my men looking out for him. If only I can get him to the interrogation table. .’ He made up his mind. ‘We’ll kill his people, and we’ll break any of their links with the Moths, but if there’s the slightest chance of a live Stenwold Maker in my hands at the end of it, that’s what I really want.’