under his direction.
It was simple enough, for Sands had a speed that belied his size. As soon as Failwright was in the shadows, he had a hand over the man’s mouth. His other hand, the Spider-Art spines jutting from his knuckles, jabbed twice, once above each kidney, small spots of red spreading in the man’s robes. With practised smoothness, Sands spun the man about, slammed his back against a wall and rammed his claws up into Failwright’s throat.
The man’s eyes were wide, his struggles disjointed. The injuries in themselves, even the last one, were not fatal, but Sands’s claws ran with poison. He held his victim firmly while the toxin did its work, locking the man’s muscles, a joint at a time, then freezing his breath. He stuck in a few more doses, just to be sure. Beetles were a tough breed, even scrawny merchants like this one.
When Failwright had finally stopped twitching, Sands removed his hand. The man was still alive, just, but not for long. There were a few red specks on Sands’s robes, but otherwise it was a remarkably clean way to end a life. Sands’s Beetle underling approached cautiously.
‘Into the river with him,’ Sands instructed, and held out a pouch that the man gratefully accepted. Filipo landed nearby, ready for his cut. Sands left the pair to it. He had a client to see.
It is all justified, he thought. We are the surgeons hacking off the dead flesh. It was not done for a political cause, for he was no revolutionary. It was done for the sheer sake of it, the philosophical necessity of honing the blade of civilization. He tested that phrase in his mind, found it good, and continued on his way a happy man.
Helmess Broiler had a polished repertoire of smiles for all occasions, but he saved the genuine ones for moments like this.
She stepped down the stairs of his townhouse as though the simple descent was an indecent act, pausing halfway to lean on the banister and grin down at him. She loved him to be duplicitous, he knew. The fact that he had been fencing with the Imperial Bellowern, whilst all the while playing a larger game was meat and drink to her. It was one of the many ways she resembled a Spider-kinden.
It had always been thus, it was true, but formerly it had been a shady habit practised behind closed doors. Beetle men of status and of power, for all that they mostly had wives and families and the like, found in themselves a yearning to exercise their potency through other channels. Mistresses were well known, scandalous when exposed, yet ubiquitous amongst a certain class of Assembler and merchant. A clever young Spider girl or handsome youth who came to Collegium would not lack for opportunity. Oh, it was not always a Spider-kinden, but that was the archetype: beautiful and dangerous and irresistibly charming.
Then Master Stenwold Maker had come along, taking up with a girl young enough to be his daughter and parading her around as though she were one of his war honours. Where there might easily have been a tide of disapproval and horror, instead there had been a strange kind of relief. Master Maker was a war hero, the people’s darling who could, just there and then, do no wrong. Keeping a young lover must be all right, therefore. This was, Helmess reflected, the one service the wretched old warmonger had ever done for his fellows.
‘Elytrya,’ he uttered her name, as she looked fondly down on him.
‘You keep them dancing,’ she observed, and took her time coming down the rest of the steps towards him. He could watch her for ever, he decided.
It was not that she was a Spider-kinden. It was that she was not a Spider-kinden, although she resembled them enough to pass as such. That she avoided other Spiders was not unusual, for Spider-kinden were their own worst enemies, so that many ending up in the Lowlands were fugitives from one political struggle or another. If her eyes were of a strange shade and larger than usual, her hair more elaborately curled, then they just assumed that Spiders, with their cosmetics, could do a great deal with their appearance. She was the best thing in Helmess’s life, and he loved her, because he loved power, and saw in her his chance to recapture it.
Honory Bellowern had been right: Helmess was much fallen from his former heights, and in no position to withstand a rumour campaign or slanderous accusation about his association with the Empire, especially if that accusation happened to be true. Being in possession of all the facts, the Empire might believe that it owned him. However, their facts were now out of date, for Helmess Broiler had been cultivating other friendships.
He had no idea how long she had been in Collegium before approaching him, how long she had spent adjusting to the differences, understanding what must have been a bewilderingly alien way of life. She had once let slip that her people, her faction, had kept agents in this city for generations, in readiness for what was due to happen so very soon.
When she had come to him first, with her flattery and her promises, she had played at being the Spider- kinden adventuress, whilst sounding him out. Physical attraction had lured him from the start, but she had gauged him well enough, and soon enough, to know it would not hold him. Instead she had appreciated that his working with her, with her unfathomable allies, represented a return to power for him, a power untainted by the Wasp Empire. She had made him an offer too attractive to turn down, and told him a secret truth that he was still trying to digest.
She leant in towards him, wrapping herself about his arm, resting her head on his shoulder. The invisible events of her plot, their plot, were beginning to unfold, in the far, dark places. She had only told him so much, but he could guess much more. The thought that he was the sole Collegiate man to be party to such an abominable act was as sexually exciting as the feeling of her warm body now pressed against him.
There was a knock at the door, but he had already briefed his servants and they let the man straight in. Helmess Broiler’s needs for this breed of agent were scant, but a successful merchant was occasionally forced to take decisive action. Forman Sands was always his first choice: not only was the man discreet and reliable, but there was no other paid killer in Collegium who managed to look like a respectable cartel clerk and could make educated after-dinner talk like a College scholar.
‘Master Broiler,’ Sands said, with a careful nod, first to his employer, and then to his employer’s mistress.
‘Your news?’
‘It’s done.’ Sands held out Failwright’s satchel, which Broiler accepted. It was bulging with scrawled scrolls, the last symptoms of Failwright’s fatal curiosity.
‘You’re a good man, Sands,’ Helmess remarked.
‘I like to think so, Master Broiler.’ Sands took the purse from Helmess’s servant almost as an afterthought, as though this wasn’t about the money at all.
When the killer had gone, Elytrya hugged Helmess close. Failwright and his annoying questions were done with.
‘Do you mean,’ he asked her softly, ‘to silence an inconvenient question, or to raise yet more? Members of the Assembly cause ripples, when they fall.’
‘Either will serve,’ she assured him. ‘We know that either will serve.’
Five
Is this any more honest than my time with the Rekef?
The copper magnate Brons Helfer and his wife were doing their best to be good hosts. Their spacious drawing room was painted blue, with frescos on two facing walls which Arianna had carefully complimented. They were in the ‘Seldis style’, which worked out as a bastard approximation of last generation’s Spiderlands artists, but hamfistedly rendered by Beetle copyists. Her compliments, not only insincere but downright false, had been gratefully received, for was she not the great Spider lady?
She was not, of course, and never had been. Her family had been hoi polloi of the coarsest character, but in the Spiderlands even the peasantry schemed and feuded. Her departure at a tender age had been prompted by the ruin of her parents, culminating in the death of her mother in a duel. At fifteen Arianna had nothing but her kinden to recommend her, as she scrounged and pilfered her way north up the Silk Road.
There the Rekef had found her, buying her from a fellow Spider, a slaver whose men had snapped her up one night. The Rekef had been explicit and detailed on what other interested parties might have acquired her, that night, what other fates could have befallen her – and might still, if she did not show how very grateful she was to them.
