Drillen might fret, but he was War Master Stenwold Maker and, in the final analysis, they would take what he said and not call him a liar to his face, not over just the death of a Fly.
Abruptly the drive for violence ebbed from him, leaving a sour residue in its wake, and he realized that he did not care about the Assembly, let them censure as they would. It was not fear of public disapproval that stayed his hand, but the personal understanding that he himself might be wrong.
I used to be so certain about things. Where did that go?
He was abruptly aware that the guards had burst in, perhaps somehow assuming that it was Stenwold himself who had been assaulted. He turned to face the two Maker’s Own soldiers and Akkestrae, and found not a shred of condemnation on their faces.
‘I’m finished here,’ he told them.
‘What about him?’ Akkestrae asked, with a predatory look.
‘I can’t see that he’d know much, in any event.’ That knife-edge of control was still there: another jab, another nudge, and he could see himself lashing out again, seeking some salve for himself by striking at the Empire in any way he could. ‘Leave him. Just hold him here.’
‘And feed him?’ the Mantis asked. ‘War Master, there will come a time when food is precious.’ The two Merchant Company soldiers stared with loathing at Gizmer as the Fly got to his feet, leaning against the wall for purchase. They would have been out on the streets most nights, Stenwold guessed. They had seen the full horrors of the aerial raids.
‘Just…’ and Stenwold shook his head and pushed past them, his main intent to put distance between himself and Gizmer, and not to reflect too much on what had just happened.
There was a sharp snapping sound that brought him up short.
When he turned, one of the soldiers was slipping a fresh bolt into the breach of his snapbow. The Fly-kinden lay in a crumpled heap against the wall.
‘He was going for you,’ the soldier said, quite matter of factly. ‘Rushing you. I thought he had a knife.’ The words were spoken as if in rehearsal.
‘He…’ Stenwold looked at the other two, unnameable feelings roiling inside him. The second soldier looked shaken, but was saying nothing. Akkestrae met his gaze with a slight raising of the eyebrows, as though not sure why he was bothering himself about the matter.
‘To die in battle is better than to live in chains,’ was all she said.
‘Would he have thought that?’ Stenwold demanded.
‘Plainly he did.’ There was no getting past her Mantis reserve.
Stenwold turned on the man who had loosed the shot, a Beetle youth who looked barely twenty and wholly unrepentant. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Jons Padstock, War Master,’ the soldier reported smartly. ‘ Maker’s Own Company.’
Padstock… and now that the name was out, Stenwold could detect the familiarity in the lad’s features. Her son, of course. And Elder Padstock, chief officer of the Maker’s Own, was his fanatic supporter, and no doubt she had steeped her family in the same doctrine.
But what can I do? He could have the youth arrested. At a time of war, he could have one of his own soldiers hauled before the Assembly for the murder of an enemy combatant, knowing all the while that Jons Padstock had done what he did out of hard loyalty to Collegium, to Stenwold himself. And some traitor part of Stenwold’s mind was glad that the decision had been taken from his hands, even pleased with the result. And this is war. Things happen in war that we would not countenance in peace.
It was no answer, but he had no answers. He turned away from them and stomped off down the corridor, unwilling to stay there and look his own weakness in the eye.
Twenty-Eight
Helmess Broiler was under scrutiny, he knew.
He was a well-to-do merchant magnate of Collegium, an Assembler, and also an avowed political foe of Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen. More than that, he had been taking the pay of the Empire for years, starting way back when nobody but Maker ever imagined that the Wasps would get to this point. And by the time the Imperial Second did come ravening up the coast during the last war, Broiler’s existing misdeeds had been enough for the Empire to keep him squarely under its thumb, their man in Collegium.
Stenwold knew all this, as had been brought forcibly to Helmess’s attention not so long ago. Helmess himself was only alive and free because Stenwold had a use for him back then, and because it was convenient for Maker to know just who the Empire’s current man was, rather than have to hunt down the next one. Since the bombing had started, Helmess had been under observation, with Maker’s spies, both hidden and in plain sight, watching for his methods of smuggling information to the city’s enemies. It was a waste of time for all concerned because Helmess no longer had any such methods at his disposal. Since the last piece of business, when the Empire’s agents had been apprehended neatly before they could take advantage of the oncoming Spider armada — which itself had come to nothing, with the abominable Maker turning them away with apparently nothing more than a harsh word or two — the Empire had ceased to include Helmess Broiler in its plans, squarely blaming him for the failure. Fair enough in a way, because Broiler had given Maker the information that saw the Imperial agents arrested, but it rankled nonetheless because the Empire didn’t know that.
Right now, Helmess was living a somewhat fraught life. His double loyalties — if he had any loyalties to anything aside from his own best interests — were not public knowledge, but there was an odour about him, nonetheless, of a man in disfavour with those in power. That meant he had few visitors, and fewer opportunities to profit. The Merchant Company soldiers troubled him at his house, tramping through his rooms occasionally for no reason other than to annoy him, and Maker’s watchers were looking constantly for heliograph flashes, message- bearing insects and hand signals out of the window, or however they might think he would inform the Empire of whatever knowledge he was supposed to possess. The rare guests at his house were searched aggressively for messages when they left, and probably followed subsequently themselves.
Two nights ago, an Imperial bomb had even landed outside his townhouse during a tense half-hour when the Farsphex seemed to be trying to attack Collegium society from the top down by targeting large houses. He had lost part of his wall, leaving that entire corner of the structure dangerously unsound. Needless to say, nobody was remotely bothered, or called to give their condolences, and he had to send his staff into the city to pay ruinously high prices to secure workmen to impart at least a stopgap stability to his home. By this time, any thought that he might still be on the Empire’s books was long gone, and the Empire itself seemed to be rather trying to wipe him out of existence altogether. Certainly his contact — or perhaps his handler — Honory Bellowern had got out of the city without a parting word immediately after the first aerial raid.
When the foreman of the work crew insisted on sorting out payment face to face, Helmess resigned himself to being robbed in broad daylight, possibly to being insulted as well. He received the man in his study, noting a lean Beetle with a badly burned face, the scars looking recent. Of course, that was quite the fashionable look in Collegium just then.
‘All right, then, what ludicrous figure-?’ he began, and the foreman said, ‘Send your servants out, Master Broiler.’
Helmess made another few false starts at the same sentence, feeling the world realign itself around him vertiginously. After a pause, he nodded, waving his retainers away.
‘Can I hope, at least, that you’ve made a genuine job of repairing the house?’ he enquired, fighting for calm.
‘Oh, the lads are all the real deal, if not exactly masters.’ The burn-scarred Beetle sat down across the desk from him, with casual insolence. ‘I was lucky. There weren’t many people keen to do your dirty work — it was easy to get the contract. I’d probably find a choosier crew to go over the work in a month or so, if I were you. Now, let’s get this done with. You’ve a list?’
‘A list?’ For a moment, cut off for so long, Helmess didn’t know what he meant. Then old conversations came back to him, words shared with the Imperial diplomat Honory Bellowern (when he was still rattling around in the embassy, minus one ambassador, and pointedly not enquiring after Helmess’s health). Of course there was a list:
