well. Now he sat hunched at a table with a pair of other Fly-kinden, setting down cards grimly, heedless of strategy, calling every bluff and playing every hand, and watching the door and windows always. He was winning, to the disgust and annoyance of his fellows.
He saw them immediately as they came in: not Liss, but he had been expecting them anyway. They were dressed in long coats and scarves, a grab-bag of kinden and halfbreeds, but they did not walk like sailors and too many of them looked his way straight off. Some small part of him realized he had been betrayed right then. Some other part of him knew she had been caught, and they had ripped it out of her. The rest of him was already moving. Quick exits were a common event here, and they kept all the shutters thrown back for that very reason. Why else would he frequent the place?
In a moment he was standing on the table, even as the newcomers made for him. He saw glints of metal: knives and a couple of the little crossbows that the Solarnese liked. They did not look like men with capture on their minds.
Stenwold Maker had been a grateful friend and a generous employer. Laszlo whipped out from within his own coat the parting gifts the Beetle spymaster had given him. The cut-down little snapbows had only recently made it to the markets, and at a ruinous price, but they were already starting to be known as ‘sleevebows’ by criminals and spies both, although they were still a little large for any Fly’s sleeves. Good models would hold their charge for hours without losing any power and, though they lacked the accuracy of a full-sized snapbow, Laszlo was unlikely to be more than five yards from anyone he intended to shoot. They were curved and elegant as spider fangs, and barely six inches long.
These men were not professionals, nor used to working together. Some of them leapt back immediately, seeking cover, a couple charged at him, and one loosed a crossbow bolt, in startled reflex, that went into the shoulder of a compatriot. Laszlo grinned and kicked off into the air, his Art wings humming about his shoulder in a flicker of light.
Someone grabbed for his ankle. He looked down at one of his fellow gamblers, already reaching towards his belt for… Laszlo never found out what for.
In Solarno he had played the quiet man, but his family had been pirates for generations, after all, and they would be so again. He felt a stab of reluctance, but none of it reached his reaction time as he shot the man through the chest, the harsh snap of his weapon barely registering in the commotion as the regular patrons rushed for the door or took off through the windows.
It was enough confusion. Free of the dead man’s grip Laszlo dodged through the nearest window himself, darting around another fleeing drinker, one weapon now discharged and the other hunting for targets.
Have they got her? Can I rescue her? If the first answer was yes, the second would likely be no — which didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. Stupid, stupid, but her face was clear in his mind, a beacon. He could not say he loved her — was there ever a more treacherous foundation to build love on? — but she had hooks in him that he could not tear out, and the thought of her in pain, in fear, or worse, tore at parts of him he had not known he possessed.
If she was free, where would she go? If, hypothetically, she was free and she wanted to keep to their pact, and knew the dockside place was compromised, then where?
She was the only person who knew where he lodged, that place near the hangars that Maker had secured for him somehow. He was not supposed to know where she lodged, but some very determined shadowing had uncovered it — and he had always thought, wished, hoped, that he had done so only because she secretly wished him to know. He had confessed the spying to her later, and she had been mock-outraged yet plainly delighted, her real motivation layered into unreadability.
But, if they were hunting her, she would hardly stay home and wait for a boot to kick her door in.
He was cornering across the city even as he thought about it, heading for his own room, hoping against hope that he would find her waiting for him there. And let her be a dozen times an enemy of Collegium if only she’s still alive!
He kept the shutters of his lodgings barred from the inside — too much of an invitation, otherwise, in a city filled with his own kinden — but there was a trick to them, one loose bar that could be prised open enough to flick the bar off its rests. He could have installed a lock, but he had worked out early on that Liss was Inapt, a rare thing in a Solarnese Fly-kinden, so he had been planning ahead in a vague and opportunistic way. He had considered that, when the game turned sour, she might come here and seek sanctuary.
He flurried down out of the darkening sky and came to sudden rest beside the window, clinging to the wall with his Art.
The bar was undisturbed, and she could not have picked the door lock. She had not been here. He almost turned away then, but the thought came that she could have left a message for him, detailing some other rendezvous, and so he hopped the bar himself and swung in, heading for the door, looking for that slip of folded paper that might give him hope.
There was nothing, but when he turned back for the window, there was a man there, a shortsword in his hand.
He was bigger than Laszlo by a foot or so, but small by most people’s standards. He wore a long coat; beneath it was a white cuirass plated with steel, Solarnese militia issue. His face was bleak and hostile, and it was that, rather than the dusk, that gave Laszlo a moment’s blinking pause before recognizing him.
‘Breighl?’ he said uncertainly. ‘ Painful? What are you doing here.’
‘The game’s up, Laszlo, or whoever you are.’ There was nothing left in the halfbreed of the man that Laszlo had drunk with, gambled with and mocked. The hand not directing a sword at him was at belt-level, half inside his coat, and Laszlo guessed at one of the little local crossbows there, already tensioned and loaded.
‘What’s going on, Painful?’ Laszlo let himself relax, wings vanishing from his back but ready to be called at a moment’s notice. He had not reloaded the spent sleevebow, but its companion was still charged, and he reckoned his reactions were better than Breighl’s at a pinch. ‘How did you find this place?’
Breighl gave him a disdainful smile. ‘You were followed here tendays ago. You’re nowhere near as good as you think you are.’
‘Where’s te Liss?’ Laszlo demanded, because he had assumed they had got his address from the girl, but now hope flared in him again.
‘So you are working with her, then,’ Breighl noted, with infinite regret. ‘We’ll pick her up, don’t you mind about that. You’re under arrest, Laszlo. You’re a foreign national working against the Cortas. The order to bring you in doesn’t specify that you have to still be breathing but, for old times’ sake, I’ll give you a chance.’
‘I’m not working against the Cortas.’
‘Laszlo, you’re working for the Spiderlands Aristoi, we know that. Don’t piss me about.’
All this time and he really believed that? Laszlo felt almost hurt. ‘Look, if you must know, I’m working out of Collegium, and you surely see that they, of all people, don’t want the Empire in here-’
‘The Empire?’ Breighl abruptly had the crossbow out and aimed at him, and Laszlo re-evaluated just who likely had the quicker reflexes. ‘You think we’re worried about the Empire now? So they have some troops up north, past Toek? So what? They’re worried about what we’re worried about, Laszlo. We know there’s a fleet of ships on the Exalsee even now, out of Mavralis. We know that a dozen Aristoi families have finally decided they can’t let Solarno remain independent any more. Don’t take us for idiots. We know your employers think this is all a game, but to us it isn’t!’ Abruptly he was shouting, the crossbow shaking wildly, making Laszlo flinch.
‘Believe me, Breighl, I have some really poor history with the Spiderlands. I’m not with them!’ Laszlo insisted. To his astonishment — almost his embarrassment — there were tears in the halfbreed’s eyes.
‘Oh, I know, the Spiders think everyone else is a fool, and so do their agents. Nobody’s as smart as them. Even the Solarnese Aristoi think it’s all so pissing clever, but we Solarnese don’t want to end up as the toys of the Spiderlands, just another cursed satrapy city, a pawn in their games. This is my city, Laszlo! I’m going to do anything I can to stop your filthy scheming mistresses get their hands on it, and if the first move in that is to put a bolt through your brain, then so be it!’
He jabbed the crossbow towards Laszlo for emphasis, and it went off.
Laszlo was already lurching to one side, an Art-sense unique to Fly-kinden warning him of it even before the string slipped. The bolt ploughed into the wall behind him, then he was going for the other man, not with the sleevebow, that would take a moment to aim in which Breighl’s sword could bat it aside, but with a dagger. Laszlo was the veteran of countless dockside brawls, skirmishes between pirates and the contested boardings of a score of ships, and in close quarters there was no weapon greater than a simple six-inch blade.
