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.
But Esmail was not finished yet. Some initiates of his mystery had to resort to crude torture to perfect their guises, or perhaps they chose to do so, but he had been trained in the higher arts of the spy, and had had his education finished off by the Moths themselves.
He put his hands either side of the man’s face and bent his head forward until their foreheads were almost touching.
Who? he asked, and the helpless, uncontrolled answer came back, Ostrec.
My name is Ostrec, Esmail told himself, knowing that he would answer to that name as swiftly as to his own — more swiftly even — as long as he wore this stolen face. Show me all that is Ostrec. Family, friends, contacts, rank, passwords, codes, missions.
The Wasp arched and twisted, the old Grasshopper leaning on him to hold him down, and his life began to tumble into Esmail’s mind in fragments and pieces, never to be quite assembled, never to be a complete whole, but with luck enough for Esmail to wear Ostrec’s shoes. After the initial incredulous horror, the Wasp was fighting him, an Apt mind forced into an Inapt arena and finding what defences it could. Ostrec hid his thoughts from Esmail just as he would keep them off his face before a superior officer, forcing the spy to hunt him through the rooms of his own mind, beating down doors, creeping through keyholes.
Esmail was an old hand at this, and at last he had enough: there were gaps still, odd holes and voids in his internal picture of Ostrec, but he knew that he could scavenge nothing more from the picked-out interior of the Wasp’s brain. He nodded at the Grasshopper: not a cut throat, with all the mess that would make, but a narrow stiletto rammed into the ear, neat and lethal and swift. The body would be disposed of far from here, never to be found again, if the Moths’ agents were any good.
Esmail straightened up, waiting for his joints to creak, but of course he was younger now, stronger and more vital. He ran a hand across his face, and it felt entirely familiar to him, as though he had been wearing it his whole life. He had put on Ostrec as a man donned a coat, taking up the Wasp’s memories, prejudices and loyalties, holding them at a slight distance so as to remain Esmail, and yet having nothing of himself showing to the world that was not Ostrec. The dead man’s own mother would not have known otherwise.
They were building a railroad depot at Skiel, but it would not be finished for months, so Ostrec was travelling by horse, with Esmail letting his natural skill decline to the basic competence of the Wasp-kinden. Because he could, and because Ostrec would have done so, he imposed himself on Skiel’s governor enough for a change of mount, so that he could make up for lost time on his way to Capitas. A lamed horse left behind on the road had already been concocted to explain why he was behind schedule, should anybody care to ask. Esmail lived out Ostrec’s pasts and futures in his head, even waking from black and gold dreams in the morning, weaving a web of
