magnates would put up much more of a fight should the Wasps come again. Whether this was just due to the legendary neutrality of the city, or whether there was something deeper working in those cluttered and grimy streets, was something that Stenwold was hoping to uncover.
He had secured passage on a freight fixed-wing that was making a quick round-trip to Myna, and that only because he had chartered it and paid for its cargo himself. He had a few hours, though, and furtive messages had brought him to an eating house in a moderately affluent part of town, a street of prosperous artisans and middling shopkeepers, not amongst the great and the good nor yet in the gutter. In Helleron, the distance between the heights of luxury and the depths of despair could be very small indeed.
Stenwold recognized him immediately, but then the man’s bodyguards did rather draw the eye. Greenwise Artector was a man too grand for this sort of place, and it showed even though he had dressed down. Turning up with a couple of Ant-kinden at his shoulders, who pointedly took a table near the door and stared at every other patron as though they were all assassins, could not help but make an impression, and Greenwise was well known enough that word would soon spread. By that time, however, he and Stenwold would have concluded their business, and the idea was that people would remember the great and wealthy merchant but not the hooded man in the artificer’s canvas whom he spoke to.
Greenwise Artector had never quite been Stenwold’s friend, but he had been a covert supporter for years. The two of them saw eye to eye on the problem of the Empire, and Artector had done a lot of good hidden work when Helleron had seen Imperial occupation. His information had been vital in fuelling the anti-Imperial resistance.
He looked thinner than Stenwold recalled, the clothes hanging off him a little, clearly tailored for more expansive days. The expensive cosmetics that smoothed out the signs of age and wear on his dark face no longer quite hid the worry around his eyes.
‘Sten,’ he said. ‘Just like old times.’
‘The wheel has rather come full circle,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘At least this time round, Collegium will be ready.’ There had been moments, before the war, when it had seemed his home city would simply ignore the entire situation, turn its back on the Imperial advance until the Wasps had reached their very doorstep, and it was too late. ‘Where will Helleron be?’
‘Officially?’ Greenwise grimaced. ‘We are proud of our neutrality. We bow to no man. Listen to most of the magnates and you’d never realize we had an Imperial governor not that long ago, and that our factories were given over to their war effort.’
‘Unofficially?’
‘There are a lot of Imperial dignitaries turning up at the airfields, Consortium merchants mostly. They turn up for a desultory bit of trade, and end up staying on to dine and chat with this magnate or that. More than half the Council plays host to them, and they talk about lucrative contracts, but there’s more going on. I have a few servants here and there that take my coin. Occupation terms for Helleron are already drafted, or as good as. The Empire’s diplomats are getting clever, and everyone’s going to end up subscribing to the same convenient lie: Helleron will get to keep its autonomy, so long as it does everything the Empire tells it.’
Stenwold nodded soberly, and then they paused while the wine arrived. The nervous waiter’s insistence that it was on the house told them that they had only a short interval before all the spies caught up with them.
‘Nothing there to surprise me,’ the War Master noted. ‘Greenwise, what do you hear from Myna in the last few days?’
‘I’d not go to Myna for all the gold in the mint,’ the magnate told him straight off. Seeing Stenwold’s expression, he nodded grimly. ‘But, as that’s where you’re going now, nothing good, Sten. The Empire’s had troops at the border for months now, on manoeuvres if you can believe it. Myna — the whole Alliance — is strung like a bow, ready to loose at any moment. I hear there have been a dozen separate border incidents in the last two months, crossing both ways, and that’s not to mention the Principalities throwing their lot in with the Empire, which means the Alliance are all over that border, too. The Wasp diplomats are complaining loudly that the Mynans can’t let go and will keep pushing them until there’s another war. Or, to translate, the Wasps will use that logic as their excuse to bring one about. It’s all firepowder over that ways, Sten. One spark will set it all off.’
‘But when?’ Stenwold asked him, feeling the sands of their conversation running out. ‘You must have sources there.’
‘All I have’s a pair of low-ranking Consortium men with gambling habits, and they know next to nothing. Sten, there’s been most of an army at the border for a good while now, and it’s kept well supplied. They could march at any time. But all the orders come from Capitas. There’s no general on the ground there yet to make the decision. That means that when the call comes…’
‘It’ll come without warning,’ Stenwold finished. ‘Greenwise, give me your best guess, then?’
The magnate seemed to have shrunk into his robes even further since the beginning of their conversation. ‘Yesterday.’ He shrugged. ‘Today. Now. I don’t know, Sten. And…’
His new tone caught at Stenwold, sensing real despair in the wreckage of the pleasant, avuncular man he had known all those years ago.
‘Sten, it’s all up for me when the Empire gets here. I’m selling everything I can here, shunting it south and west. What I did during the war… I got away with it at the time, but I know some of the others have put it all together since. They know where I stand, even if they don’t know all the details. If the Wasps get here, then I get out or my life’s not worth a Moth’s curse.’
He stood abruptly, and the two Ants were on their feet in the same instant. ‘Goodbye, Sten. See you in Collegium, maybe, or Sarn. Anywhere but here.’
They were forced down before they even reached Myna, two orthopters sliding across the sky in front of the fixed-wing freighter Stenwold had chartered. There was a scattered flash of light, the heliograph signals that were slowly becoming a crude language between aviators. In this case, Stenwold’s pilot had no idea of the message, but the hostile behaviour of the Mynan fliers was unmistakable, so he brought the freighter down at a dirt airstrip outside a tiny village within sight of Myna’s walls.
It turned out to be something approximating a customs inspection, with a squad of Mynan soldiers muscling up to the craft with the clear intent of searching every inch of it. Stenwold showed them his papers, and just whose name was at the foot of them. It would be pleasant to say that their attitude turned at once to helpful benevolence, but the best they could manage was a kind of stand-offish annoyance.
Stenwold considered how this was what Myna seemed like coming from the west. Had they flown in from the Imperial east, he guessed that the freighter would have been shot down without warning.
They made the short hop to Myna, coming down over its top airfield, of persistent memory. Stepping out onto that open space, seeing the flat-roofed warehouses and merchants’ offices surrounding it, Stenwold was twenty years younger for a second, fleeing here from the city itself even as the Wasp soldiers coursed overhead.
Ah, Tisamon. His friend, the Mantis Weaponsmaster, had been trying to get himself killed that day, an ambition realized only a few years ago.
He showed the same papers to the Mynan official that approached him, while his pilot supervised the unloading. There were five modest crates, each containing a dozen snapbows and ammunition. Too little, too late, but what could he do? That Myna would be first on the Empire’s list was clear to anyone who cared to look at a map, whether the Wasps turned for the Lowlands or the Commonweal. The Three-city Alliance sat at the flashpoint of the known world, so Stenwold could excuse them a little paranoia.
He had almost expected to find the city under siege even as he arrived. He could fool himself that, if he concentrated very hard, he could sense the Imperial forces massing to the east, just across the nebulous and ill- defined border.
‘Master Maker, you know you’re finding your own way back?’ It was his pilot, at his shoulder. ‘I’m not staying here, you understand.’ There was neither cowardice nor disloyalty in the sentiment. The man was a Helleren merchant, not some partisan.
‘Fair weather to you,’ Stenwold told him. ‘The Mynans will get me back to Helleron.’
‘Stenwold Maker in the flesh!’ The hailing voice caught his attention, and the pilot took the opportunity to make himself scarce and go to start his engines.
The woman striding across the airfield, outstripping her retinue and making them run to keep up, was a striking sight. Like the other Mynan Beetles she had blue-grey skin and blue-black hair, but there was something of the Ant-kinden in her physique, leaner and more compact than Beetles usually were. She was young, perhaps
