‘Hardly, given that you work for them,’ Breighl remarked sourly.
‘Me? Why would you think such a thing?’ Her smile disarmed him, as it always did. Of the three of them, the halfbreed was the unhappiest, for he was as smitten with her as the rest and yet knew he had no chance with her.
‘Who do I owe, I wonder? Who do I want to owe me?’ te Liss’s eyes roved about the table. ‘Dice for it, perhaps? Or will the Empire stump up some coin to keep me off the streets?’ She raised her eyebrows at te Riel.
He controlled his momentary scowl. ‘What the Empire will do, I can only guess. I’m more than happy to keep you off the streets, Bella.’
‘Hover-fly. Your round, hover-fly,’ Laszlo told him.
‘Don’t call me that.’ Their needling him about the Empire was the only thing that got a rise out of te Riel, and the more he denied it, the more they believed it.
‘Brandy, was it?’ Laszlo kept on. ‘Pick a good year.’ Everyone knew the best brandy was Wasp-export.
Te Riel stood, turning the angry motion into a curt wave at one of the taverna staff. ‘If you truly thought I was Rekef you’d not be so free with me.’ He had said it before, and it was the unconscious stress he put on ‘Rekef’, that sudden passion, that had decided the others about his allegiance.
‘I see Lorchis isn’t in his seat by the corner yet,’ Breighl observed, changing the subject as naturally as he could. ‘And no sign of Raedhed either.’
A fresh bottle came, not brandy but local sweet wine, and they got to discussing their peers, presences and absences and speculation, trading gems of information that spies in other cities would have had to shadow and lurk and burgle for and still end up with nothing more reliable at the end of it.
The Empire was out there, a formless shadow on the northern horizon, a vast storm-front that could head south at any time. There were Aristoi families, just the far side of the Exalsee, that had designs on Solarno, and probably on the wider world. There were Ants whose only plan for defending their sovereignty was the systematic beating down of their neighbours. There was a Beetle spymaster who had readied himself so much for the next Wasp attack that he might just end up precipitating it. Laszlo knew it, and everyone in the Taverna te Remi knew it.
But Liss was sneaking him a grin, even though she was hanging on to te Riel’s arm. Her expression seemed to say that she was forced to pander to the Imperial, with his ready money and his arrogant manner, but they both knew who she would rather be touching.
The spring was warm, the promised summer hotter. The prospect of war, always alluded to but never spoken of outright, seemed a long way away just now.
She had left on te Riel’s arm that day, but two days later towards nightfall she dropped into Laszlo’s lodgings, where he was keeping a desultory eye on the civic hangars. Letters of introduction from some Fly aviatrix in Collegium had secured Laszlo a small third-storey room within sight of the city’s upper classes, and this place was more than most foreign agents could have boasted. Besides, small and high up only meant that it was perfect for a Fly-kinden.
‘I can’t stay,’ she warned him, even as she flitted in through his window. He was lying on his side, stripped to the waist in the evening’s muggy heat, trying to balance his telescope so that it would support itself while he looked through it.
‘Top-secret orders come through at last?’ he asked her drily.
‘Breighl wants me to go to the theatre with him.’
‘You’d rather have orders?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘And I’m not suggesting that Painful feels that way about you, but some orders, hm? From whoever you really work for?’
Laszlo shrugged. ‘Nice just to take stock, sometimes.’
She had been poised in the open window all this time, and now she darted over to the bed, landing demurely beside him. Laszlo was lean and strong, for a Fly, having spent much of his life wrestling with sails and lines, and she put a hand on his arm with a mischievous expression. ‘Stories, stories,’ she murmured, for it was his bad arm, the one he had broken, and the mottling of injury was still to be seen.
‘You’ve seen mine, do I get to see yours?’ he asked her gamely.
A snort was all that got him, and a change of subject. ‘Anything to drink? If I’m going to sit through three hours of Spider opera, I need a lining to my stomach. Brain, too, probably.’
He had a bucket of water in the lee of the window, where the sun never quite chased the shadows away, and the bottle he extracted from it was still cool. He was quite aware that this was not what Stenwold Maker had sent him here for, and that a proper spy would probably know all sorts of ways to seduce te Liss and get her talking. He could only imagine te Riel trying and — in his mind’s eye — abjectly failing. With Laszlo himself, however, she seemed more than willing to be seduced, and by unspoken accord neither of them asked awkward questions. Take good weather where you find it, as Laszlo’s old sailing master used to say.
They would talk often of te Riel and Breighl, or of other agents, the individual personalities of the Solarnese intelligencing crowd, but nothing of the causes, the nations and powers. We are living in the moment between one wave and the next. Long may it last.
She did not make the theatre that night.
Later, close to midnight, there was a crash from outside, a shattering of glass, and Laszlo leapt from the bed, whipping a knife from his discarded belt without thinking. A moment’s pause and he heard drunken laughter outside, and someone else cursing — just late revellers bound for home. He looked for Liss’s sleeping form and found her already halfway to the window. The blade in her hand was hiltless with a weighted pommel, perfect for throwing. For a moment they faced each other, armed and deadly, waiting to see if something had changed.
Liss breathed out a shuddering sigh, casting her weapon aside. She sat on the bed, looking abruptly tired and human, not the grinning little tease who kept three men on their toes at the Taverna te Remi. ‘Laszlo…’ she began.
He was beside her on the instant, and she leant into his embrace gratefully, even though he only remembered to drop his dagger a moment later.
‘It wasn’t-’ he started, but she just shook her head. War. It wasn’t war.
Three
In the last days of spring, the high paths of the mountain were still treacherous with snow. When she walked, she skidded and slipped, clinging to the slick rock face with both hands for purchase. When she flew, the wind made a plaything of her, whirling her about the stone as though she was flying through a maze of knives and bludgeons.
She was Moth-kinden, though, and this was her home. The peaks around Tharn had been a stronghold of her people for thousands of years. One of the last few since the Apt had driven them from the Lowland cities.
Grey-skinned, grey-robed, her eyes featureless white, her hair a sheet of black falling past her shoulders: a monochrome woman, a shadow or a ghost, slipping silently at midday through the high passes, unnoticed.
She hoped unnoticed. She had a great deal of practice in passing unseen past living eyes, but she was no great magician — certainly as her people measured such things — and if the eyes that were seeking her belonged to her own kinden, then no amount of stealth and secrecy might suffice to hide her.
Her name was Xaraea, and she was a woman of fragmented loyalties. Loyal to her kinden, of course, or at least to those that called Tharn their home, or to their secret service, the shadowy Arcanum that could evoke the same fear as the Imperial Rekef in the right circles. But even that was not quite true, for the Arcanum had been riven with factions and rivalries since long before some barbarian Wasp chief ever thought of building an Empire. She was loyal to a handful of Skryres — the high magicians of the Moths — who were her superiors in her chapter of the Arcanum, men and women of implacable, unquestioned authority whose names she did not even know.
There was a sudden flurry of white, not fresh but blown from above, and she crouched, drawing her cloak about her, displaying stone colours against the stone. Moth eyes could still be blinded by snow, so she remained huddled, looking over her shoulder and waiting to see if the passing of the gust revealed any untoward movement
