than anything else, that the sergeant knew him.
He was a bright man, that sergeant: being faced by a figure who was renowned as genius, traitor and dead, all at once, gave him pause for thought. At last he compromised on, ‘You have papers, of course, sir,’ as neutral a challenge as a Wasp had ever made.
The pale halfbreed smiled slightly, and his associate reached into one of a score of pouches and brought out a crumpled document with a seal on it. The Empress’s seal, the sergeant noted. This dog-eared and maltreated piece of paper had once been in her own hands.
A moment’s reading had confirmed either the best or the worst. Yes, this was the infamous Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos. Yes, he had never been a deserter, after all, nor dead, but had been released from his official duties by the Empress, a pleasant fiction given that he had surely abandoned his post before she had ever assumed the throne. Yes, he had every business being here. After the rest, the sergeant could have guessed that. After all, there had been a contingent of the mercenary Iron Glove artificers working alongside the reforming Eighth for the last month.
‘Welcome to Malek Camp, sir.’
‘You’ll go far, sergeant.’ Drephos, as those closest to him called him, cast his gaze about, seeing the ragged bustle of a more than usually chaotic Imperial camp: several thousand soldiers and their slaves and supporters and — most importantly — their machines. ‘Two questions. Where are my men, and where is your Major…?’ He snapped the fingers of his armoured hand with a hollow click.
‘Ferric,’ the other halfbreed filled in for him.
‘You’ll find them both together up on the rise south of camp,’ the sergeant replied, and promptly detailed a reluctant soldier to lead the way, and thereby get both halfbreeds well away from him.
Major Ferric was presiding over a grand assembly of what must have been most of Malek Camp’s cooking staff, and the smell of some kind of stew came clearly to Totho as he and Drephos ascended. All around them, artificers were working, both Imperial engineers and the men of the Iron Glove, but Major Ferric was distinguishing himself by not getting in the way and instead making sure everyone got fed.
He was a heavily built, broad-shouldered Wasp with a face dominated by a broken nose that had never been reset properly. He had sharp eyes, though, spotting his visitors as soon as they stepped within the white light of the working lamps, and Totho saw his eyebrows lift.
‘Colonel-Auxillian!’ Ferric called, without leaving his post by the cooking fires. ‘Over here.’
It was hardly proper protocol, but Drephos was an odd man in that way, sometimes making the Wasp-kinden jump through hoops for his amusement, other times heedless of any and all degrees of rank and priority. He made a quick path over to Ferric in his slightly lurching stride, Totho tagging along at his heels.
‘Glad to see you made it, Colonel.’ Ferric gave him a casual salute. ‘You won’t remember, but I was with you and the Sixth during the Twelve-year War. Pleasure to work with you again, sir.’
Drephos nodded, plainly not recalling the man at all, but then most other people were not a particularly important part of his world. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘Well, sir, your men and mine are working to get the great-shotters up and ready, because I have a feeling we’re due to get orders to kick over the ant’s nest some time soon, and these beasts of yours take a lot of calibration. As there’s not a great deal I can personally contribute, and as my lads are all pulling double shifts to make up the time, I reckon the best employment for me is making sure there’s hot food for everyone.’
The Colonel-Auxillian — although his continuing right to that rank was somewhat in dispute — stared at him briefly, and then nodded in grudging approval. ‘These men are all engineers?’
‘Two-thirds of the engineers I have,’ Ferric confirmed, ‘and the rest are sleeping.’
‘A great deal of this work is menial. Why haven’t you commandeered help from the rest of the army?’
‘Ah, well, sir.’ Ferric shrugged, pragmatically. ‘Colonel Erveg, now, he’s a traditionalist. He doesn’t much hold with advances in engineering. He says they took Myna without all these toys last time, and he’ll do it again just the same, soon as orders come through.’
Drephos exchanged a look with Totho, rolling his eyes at the foolishness of the world with special reference to the Imperial command. ‘Well, then, we should change that.’
‘He won’t want to listen to you, sir. Colonel-Auxillian won’t cut anything with him.’
At Drephos’s impatient gesture Totho pulled out another creased paper bearing a set of seals.
‘Rejoice, then,’ Dariandrephos noted wryly, ‘Colonel Ferric.’ He handed the commission over to the startled officer. ‘I have been requested to make sure that the “toys” the Empire has purchased from the Iron Glove cartel are put to their best use. To that end, the Eighth Army, which this force will soon be a part of, requires a chief engineer. You seem capable, so I bestow the honour on you. Now, sir, perhaps you might send a runner for this Colonel Erveg.’
Major — Colonel — Ferric took his promotion in his stride, offering just another waggle of the eyebrows to indicate this sudden jump in his fortunes. Nonetheless he had a Fly-kinden in the air a moment later, off to wake up the man who, a moment ago, had been in sole charge of Malek Camp.
In the meantime, Totho had rounded up the chief of the Iron Glove men there. ‘Tell me you’ve got at least one of the Sentinels up and running.’
‘Only one.’ The artificer, a squat Bee-kinden from the far shores of the Exalsee, shrugged his powerful shoulders. ‘Got it in a shed down the hill. Not had the time to get any of the others into order.’
‘Take a crew, then, and go get it started up,’ Totho directed. ‘Bring it right here. We’re about to change some priorities.’ He looked up at the towering greatshotters, their brass-bound steel barrels angled as though to shoot down the moon, the metal wrapped in an intricate mesh of spider silk and wire to stop it bursting asunder. Soon, he knew, these huge weapons would speak their thunder for the first time.
Myna. But then he had no fond memories of the place, in all honesty, and even the unfond ones had been so long ago that he could not bring himself to feel any strong emotion about what would shortly happen to it.
Nine
Stenwold had sent Laszlo to Solarno because he needed an agent there, also because it was a reward for Laszlo’s previous efforts, and because there was some logic to sending a man who had been on ships most of his life to a city on the shores of a vast lake. Arriving with Stenwold’s orders in his mind, and the white-walled vista of the city before him, Laszlo had expected many things.
He had not expected to start to care about it all. He had not expected the spying game to get so personal, friendships and rivalries and muddied allegiances. He had not expected to become infatuated with a girl who might be working for anyone or nobody at all.
She had said she would meet him. Solarno was drawn tight as a wire. The Cortas were ordering arrests, exiling random foreigners, searching ships. Nobody went to the Taverna te Remi any more. The place had closed down three days before and its owner had either disappeared or been disappeared. The casual detente between the Solarnese agents had broken at last, like ice at the end of winter. And, of course, it could not have lasted, but Laszlo had loved it while it had. There had been a feeling there that people of his newfound trade could deal with each other in a civilized manner.
Now they were at each other’s throats, and Solarno had become a dangerous place to stay. They remembered the Imperial boot there. Before the war they had been a big fish, and the Exalsee a small pond compared to the world beyond. Now the Empire and the Spiderlands and the Lowlander powers were moving out there in the darkness: great slabs of plans grinding into place, fit to crush little cities to dust. And Solarno was not even the biggest fish around the Exalsee any more.
It was time to get out.
She had said she would meet him, had te Liss. The night after the Taverna te Remi’s closing they had made their pact. To the pits with loyalties and whatever wretched, desperate espionage Solarno was still a stage for. They were getting out.
So he had chosen this place — a dockside dive that catered for sailors, and few of them native Solarnese. It was one of the first places he had made contacts, drawing on his past.
Dusk, they had agreed, but he had come early to avoid any surprises. He had thought she might do so as
