down her breasts. Twenty years living like this, and still it pinched. Her mother had been a camp whore with the Sixth, and she had grown up around soldiers, seen how they spoke, how they walked. She had seen, too that while they swore and complained and died, they still lived better than their enemies — or their women.
The Twelve-year War had been a good time to find spare uniforms, provided you didn’t mind stripping the dead, and there were always soldiers getting separated, then joining up with other detachments. The girl her mother had called Gesa had become the soldier Garvan, a boy too young to need to shave, but who could swear with the best of them. Always she had driven herself harder, taken more soldier’s risks to cover the woman’s risks that nobody knew she was taking. In that way she had been promoted. In that way she had been put to use by the intelligencers. Going alone into enemy territory to spy and scout was dangerous, but the duty relieved her of the constant threat of discovery. She spent her war fighting on two fronts.
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.
Six
There was a wayhouse west of Skiel that was more than it seemed — not one of those disapproved-of-but-
