‘Best not to trouble your chief. It’s all a little quiet, you know – trading on the sly, if you see?’ Varmen was studying his dirty fingernails with exaggerated unconcern.
‘I see,’ the Dragonfly chief confirmed. ‘You should pass through swiftly. I’m sure the Colonel would agree.’
At the mention of that Imperial title, Thalric almost choked, but he held it in and kept it there whilst the Dragonflies rose aloft and flew back towards Solamen.
‘Glad you’re with me now?’ Varmen asked them, grinning broadly.
‘What was that?’ Thalric demanded. ‘For that matter, why in the pits were they dressed like that? And a colonel? Has Solamen been taken over by madmen?’
‘Not just Solamen, the whole of the Principalities – all the land the Empire bit out of the Commonweal during the war,’ Varmen explained. ‘You’ve got to think – this was all Imperial until the Alliance cities kicked us out, and the Commonweal never actually took them back.’
‘But why?’ Che demanded. ‘Surely they’re free now?’
‘Oh, free,’ replied Varmen dismissively. ‘Free for what? Free to wait until the Empire comes back? Look, most of the noble families that were lording it over places like this got wiped out, right? Down to the last little snapper among them, is what I heard.’
Thalric nodded, lips pressed together, but Varmen failed to notice his reaction.
‘So who takes over? Some peasant farmer? Who else knows how to run things, ’cept us?’
‘And so they let us through because we were Wasps?’ Thalric demanded. ‘What was all that about merchants?’
‘Well, you know… merchants,’ Varmen echoed, with a peculiar emphasis.
‘Explain,’ Thalric insisted, but at his side Che was laughing. She was doing her best to contain it, but it was leaking out all over: her shoulders shaking, muffled snorting noises from behind her hand.
‘Well, come on,’ Varmen said, ‘what would you think: two people who really, honestly aren’t merchants come in, and they’d come from the capital, and they had, you know, secret business to attend to, all hush-hush, you know?’
‘Oh, you bastard, they thought we were Rekef,’ said Thalric, finding himself momentarily unable to know how he should feel about that.
Varmen shrugged. ‘They know about the Rekef here. They know how the Rekef killed off all their old nobles, and they know they don’t exactly want a new crop coming in from the Commonweal just yet, given how badly the old lot did. So, yeah, Rekef. Why not?’
Thalric gave in, and a moment later, catching Che’s eyes, he gave out a bleak laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
‘All right, all right,’ Varmen said, slightly put off now. ‘It’s not that funny.’
‘Oh, it is,’ Thalric told him. ‘Believe me, it is.’
That night, when they were well past Solamen and after Che had gone to sleep, Varmen said, ‘I’ve got to ask. You and her, what’s going on?’
Thalric stared at him coldly. ‘None of your business, Sergeant.’ He had guessed the man’s rank within minutes of meeting with him in Myna.
Varmen held his closed hands up before him, a gesture of appeasement. ‘It’s just that, I reckoned you were in charge, and she was your woman, you know – or your slave, or maybe a scribe or something. But this is her journey, isn’t it? And you’re tagging along.’
‘Like I said, it’s not your business to worry about. Just get us to the Commonweal.’ Thalric was annoyed at how transparent the situation had become. Perhaps I should put a hand on the rudder of this little trip? As a Wasp- kinden man, he felt that he should be offended that a woman of a lesser kinden was expecting him to trail after her. If he worked at it, he could get up quite a head of self-righteousness, but he did have to work at it. To his surprise, he found that, left to his own devices, he wouldn’t care much.
Of course, I have no idea precisely where we’re going, or why, so a fine fool I’d look by demanding to take the lead and then having to ask the way. Che had decided that she had to save her foster-sister, Tynisa. Save her from what? Thalric had no fond memories of the half-Spider girl who had tried to kill him on two separate occasions. In his opinion, it was not saving that she needed, so much as putting out of her misery like a mad animal. She stabbed Achaeos, after all. Why doesn’t Che want her dead, after that?
Unless the girl’s playing her cards close, and that is what she does want after all…
His memories of that brief sequence of incomprehensible events was far clearer than he was comfortable with. They had all been in Jerez, and had just recovered that wretched piece of tat that Achaeos the Moth had called the ‘Shadow Box’. Why the nasty little relic was so important, the Moth-kinden was never able to explain to Thalric’s satisfaction, but then Thalric was in no position to make demands, being there on sufferance, nominally as their prisoner and still recovering from his wounds.
Anyway, they had got hold of the thing, and Achaeos had been fingering it avariciously and then, without warning, he and Tynisa – and even Tynisa’s murderous father Tisamon – had just dropped as though simultaneously struck on the head.
I should have taken the opportunity to kill the lot of them and take the box myself, Thalric thought, but it was almost by rote, old motivations grown stale since he had abandoned his role as a Rekef officer. What had actually happened was that he and Gaved, the other Wasp present, had just goggled at one another uselessly, tried and failed to rouse the sleepers, and then Tynisa had jumped up and put her rapier into Achaeos – very nearly a fatal wound there and then.
Thalric and Gaved had done their best to subdue her, but in the end only the intervention of one of Gaved’s local cronies had managed that. It was a wonder she didn’t kill the lot of us, Thalric admitted in the privacy of his own mind, where he could afford to be honest with himself.
And yet Che seems to want no kind of revenge, but instead seeks to save the bloody-handed halfbreed woman from some indistinct threat. Unwelcome memories stirred inside Thalric, and he fought them down. I have no idea what that threat is, he insisted to himself. He was not ready to face such thoughts, and he might never be.
He was, however, aware that Che did not seek revenge, because Che was not Wasp-kinden, or Mantis- kinden, or even Spider-kinden. Her people did not place such a premium on personal honour. Moreover, Che saw the world very differently even from the bulk of her own people, for she suffered under a peculiar curse that had fallen upon her at the end of the war.
When Achaeos died, Thalric reflected uncomfortably, trying to dismiss any possible connection between the two. Still, the thoughts hounded him: When Achaeos died, when Tisamon died… why do I believe there is a link?
Che had then lost her Aptitude. She had lost that world of reason and mechanics and light that was her birthright, and instead she was groping through a new world of charlatanry and ignorance, living off scraps of esoteric knowledge left over from the Days of Lore. That Che’s new viewpoint had saved both her and Thalric more than once was something he was unhappy to consider, but that he could not avoid acknowledging. This thought was a grain of sand in his mind that no amount of explanation could turn into a pearl.
There was only one other person that Thalric could name who had suffered the same reversal, and the fact that she had done so was a closely guarded secret. Seda, Empress of the Wasps, was likewise become Inapt, and on nights like these, when sleep kept its distance from him, he was forced to confront that curious web of interdependence: Che and the dead man Achaeos, Seda and the dead man Tisamon. Why do I feel they are linked? Why? There could be no connection, and yet some part of him remained sure of it, beyond any rational argument.
And now Che is asking me questions about the Empress? Thalric sat before their guttering fire, Che sleeping beside him, Varmen snoring gently on the far side of it. He felt as though the night was full of huge, monolithic things moving silently but massively, coming together to built some terrible edifice that he would be afraid to look upon.
I should leave, he told himself, not for the first time. Che is not in her right mind. This entire business is madness.
But he made no move to go, just looked down at her face in the firelight. We have travelled a long road together, since my men caught you in Helleron, he considered. We shall walk a few miles more in each other’s
