‘If that lad knew he was talking to a Bridgeburner he’d have pissed himself,’ the man said.
Spindle cursed under his breath. ‘Took your own damned time, didn’t you?’ He rubbed his hand over his chest, listening for guidance, heard nothing. This man was no mage. ‘Who are you anyway? Where’s Filless?’
‘Filless is no longer with us. Someone’s made a sport of hunting Imperial mages and Claws.’ He turned to address him directly. ‘If I were you I’d keep my head down.’
‘Hunh. That’s me. Question still stands. Who’re you?’
‘I’m with the Imperial delegation.’
Spindle snorted again. ‘Military intelligence. Shoulda known.’
‘We learned long ago not to depend entirely on the Claw.’
‘Hood’s cautionary finger to that, my friend.’
‘So — your report?’
‘Some kinda spook’s entered the city. Drug his arse outta the burial grounds to the south. Wasn’t alone neither. Has servants. And they ain’t entirely human, if you know what I mean.’
The intelligence officer let out a faint whistle, fingers tapping on his lap. ‘And the Moranth flee … Damned scary, that.’
‘As did we. You lot marched out.’
‘Just a training exercise,’ the fellow answered, as if it was un-important. ‘I want you to try to track him, or it, down.’
Spindle gave him his best glare.
The young officer murmured, ‘Might I remind you the punishment for desertion is still death?’
Stretching out his legs, Spindle took out a handful of nuts he’d purchased from a street vendor, began cracking them and tossed them one by one into his mouth. ‘Amateurish bluff, lad. I’m the last asset you got left in this whole Queen-damned city.’
The officer studied his tapping fingers for a time. ‘I wouldn’t count on that. When the Fifth came to this continent an Imperial Sceptre was sent with High Fist Dujek. It’s with us now. Here in the city. And it’s awakened.’
Spindle missed his mouth with a thrown nut.
The young intelligence officer pursed his lips eloquently. ‘Until then — we’ll just have to put up with you.’
Then he squeezed the nuts in his sweaty hand.
Stooped and shuffling, Aman picked his way through his wrecked shop. Taya followed in his wake. Her steps were dainty and soundless against his noisy dragging of his boots through the broken wares.
She wrinkled her nose at the churned-up dust. ‘Revenge?’ she asked. ‘A warning?’
Aman picked up a relatively whole glass urn, turned it in an errant ray of sunlight that penetrated the shutters he kept locked. ‘No, my dear. Neither.’ He dropped the urn to smash to pieces alongside its fellows. ‘Irrelevant. All too irrelevant.’
Taya studied his gnarled profile. She blew a hair from her face. ‘Then why are we here?’
‘Tone, dear. Watch your tone. Petulant. It is not becoming.’
She raised her full painted lips in a smirk that was almost a leer. ‘Depends upon what you’re looking for.’
After a moment Aman tilted his head to acknowledge the point. ‘True. It has served you in the past. But things are changing now. And you must change as well.’
She snorted her opinion of that. ‘
He was examining the glittering jade-encrusted statue, running his mangled hands over its strange crusted armour of stone. ‘You are wasting your breath, young one. Too long among those who can so easily be stung. Whereas I possess no vanity to be plucked like a thin rich robe. No fragile self-image so readily chipped or shattered.’ He regarded her, his gaze weighing. ‘No. The die is cast … as they say. We merely wait while the ripples spread outward — if I may be permitted to tweak my metaphors. We must wait for we are yet vulnerable, yes? But soon … soon we shall be unassailable. Never you doubt, child.’ He clasped his hands together under his uneven chin as if praying. ‘So. What happened here?’
She shrugged her thin bare shoulders. ‘Someone broke in and ransacked the place. Probably offended by your housekeeping.’
Aman touched his fingertips to his mouth. His mismatched eyes, one brown, the other a sickly yellow, seemed to peer in two directions. ‘No. That is not what happened at all. Observe.’ He indicated the floor next to the statue. Taya looked: near where it stood the floorboards clearly showed the dark outline, free of dust, of its carved stone armoured boots.
‘It moved,’ she breathed.
Aman smiled lopsidedly — the only way he could. ‘Yes.’
‘So … it’s alive?’
He patted the statue’s chest. ‘No. It is not. Makes it even more formidable, truth be told. No, this is what happened. Someone entered undetected, bypassing all my considerable wards, spirit guardians, and Warren-keyed traps. An accomplishment all by itself. He was in the process of examining the premises when the one guardian he did not anticipate acted.’
‘And the mess?’
‘The clumsy efforts of my foreign friend to corner the pest … who, with breathtaking insolence, continued his search even while being chased.’ He shook his misshapen head, awed. ‘Such effrontery! It will be his downfall.’
Taya raised an expressive, elegant brow. ‘Whose downfall?’
Aman tugged at something clasped in one stone fist. He pulled again, grunting. Cloth tore. He raised a dirty shred of material: a stained handkerchief. ‘An old friend. Slipped greasily away … yet again.’
CHAPTER VII
The scholar and traveller Sulerem of Mengal writes in his journals of a distant land to the south where every man and woman is as a sovereign unto themselves. It is a wasteland where in over a hundred years not even one fallen tree has been moved.
Kiska had long lost track of how many leagues of shoreline she and Leoman had walked when, eventually, as she knew he would, the man cleared his throat in a way that told her he had something to say — something she would no doubt not want to hear.
She stopped on the stretch of black sand, the sun-bright surf brushing up the strand, and turned to regard him. He stood some paces back. His hands were at his weapon belt; his long pale robes hung grimed and ragged at their bottom edge over his chain coat. He was growing a beard to match his moustache and his hair hung long and unkempt from beneath his peaked helmet.
She knew she must present no prettier a picture. She waved for him to speak. ‘What is it?’
He gave an uneasy shrug, not meeting her eyes. ‘This is useless, Kiska. If he wanted to be found he’d have come to us long ago.’
‘We don’t know that …’
‘Stands to reason.’
