College. She had worked hard since then: from artificer’s mate to chief engineer, to navigator, to the Home’s master, taking orders only from the cartel that owned the vessel. When they were out of port, hers was the only commanding voice, or so she was used to.
Stenwold Maker, she thought. Oh, but she remembered Maker from College, twenty years ago: a plump, idealistic youth a year younger than she, always hanging about with his mad friends: that crazy Mantis and the Spider girl everyone liked so much. The Mantis had died in the war, she had heard. Some said he had ended up killing the Wasp Emperor. What had happened to the Spider, nobody seemed to know, save that Stenwold’s ward looked mightily familiar to Jaclen, the one time she had seen the girl.
Still, Maker had done well enough for himself, and Jaclen didn’t begrudge him. He did some fine work in the war, they say. The war was a sore point. Like most of Collegium’s merchant fleet she had been caught outside the city when the Vekken blockade came in, and had therefore not been able to lift a finger to help. Still, I’d rather Master Maker did well for himself in the world without involving me.
She had his note in her hand now. As per instruction, as grudgingly per instruction, she had not so much as broken the seal until the Migrating Home had pulled out of harbour. She did not like being any man’s game piece, but it seemed that her fate had now been commandeered by Collegium’s War Master.
To the Master of the Migrating Home, the note had begun. Complaints have been brought to the Assembly of increasing attacks upon the shipping of our city on its journeys east. That was Rones Failwright’s work, Jaclen well knew. The man had been agitating in the Amphiophos for an age about the pirates. Now it seemed that someone of moment had finally noticed him. Why all the secrecy, though? she asked herself. Stenwold’s note had gone on: I am arranging for a vessel, the Tidenfree under Master Tomasso, to catch up with you once you are under way. You will take on board a detachment of guards who will serve to deal with any raiders or brigands of the sea that you should meet. This is at my expense, and no demands will be made of your employers. Which was all very well, and terribly generous of the man, but Jaclen could not help wondering why they hadn’t just marched the guards on board there at the docks, with fanfare and ceremony, to let all eyes know that the Migrating Home was no longer free prey for piracy. The only logical conclusion was not a happy one, namely that Stenwold Maker was playing a game. He did not want to warn the pirates off, but instead was setting a trap for them. And I’m to be the bait, curse the man. Jaclen morosely watched the Fly-kinden corvette coming in, reefing its sails and letting its engine match speeds with the chugging Home.
Twenty years, woman and girl, she had kept the Home afloat, and in that time she had been boarded by pirates eight times. Once, when the attackers had been some wildly overconfident raiders from Felyal, she had ordered them driven off with crossbows. The other times she had called on her crew to stand down and stand by, while the pirates removed the best of the cargo. Of those eight occasions, five had occurred over the last year and a half. If that had not been the case she would not have willingly gone along with this ploy, but matters were now growing desperate. Keeping her ear to the ground, she knew that the consortium that owned the Home was tottering, reeling from its losses. Other merchants had been broken, left penniless when their ships came back empty, or sometimes did not come back at all. Many were abandoning the sea trade for other business less fraught with difficulty.
It had occurred to her that this venture might be piracy wearing a different hat. If Maker had gone bad, then he might be using his good name to have ships stand quietly by and be boarded. She did not quite believe that, for she had never before known pirates who worked by appointment.
The Fly vessel, sleeker and smaller than the Home, drew close with careful steering. Jaclen ordered the engines stopped, and lines cast over to secure them. Even before the two vessels were linked a pair of Fly-kinden had hopped over, wings glittering briefly in the sunlight. One was a young man and the other old enough to be his father, with a striking bush of a black beard.
‘You’d be this Master Tomasso, then?’ Jaclen enquired curtly, as the Flies landed before her.
‘I’m none other,’ the Fly said, grinning. ‘Permission to come aboard, Skipper?’
‘Granted, I suppose.’ She then cast an eye over the Tidenfree’s deck. ‘Master Tomasso,’ she asked, her voice tightly controlled, ‘what do you intend?’ Her hand crept towards her belt and the knife she kept there. Gathered ready to board her vessel was a pack of Mantis-kinden, armed to the teeth: just the sort of sea-reavers that she had always tried to steer well clear of.
Tomasso glanced back at his ship and gave a laugh at the sight, startlingly loud from such a small man. ‘I can see why you’d worry. Never fear, Master Courser, they’re not about to descend on you with claw and sword. These are Maker’s bodyguards, here just to make sure you get safe and sound to wherever you’re headed.’
Jaclen put a hand to her head, feeling a pain coming on. ‘We’re bound for Everis, Tomasso: the Spider- kinden. I don’t see them being in the market for that particular cargo.’
‘We’ll just keep them below decks and quiet-like, once you get there,’ Tomasso replied, still grinning broadly. ‘After all, let’s hope they don’t even have to draw a blade all voyage. On the other hand, if you are overhauled by some ragbag of pirates, then who would you rather have at hand to see the villains off?’
Jaclen shook her head. Even as she watched, the Mantids began jumping or flying aboard, scarcely a one of them deigning to walk the gangplank like civilized people. They were a rough lot: claws and rapiers, longbows and arm-spines and battle-scars. Most wore leather jerkins or greatcoats, or cuirasses of chitin scales, and a couple even had pieces of the old-style carapace armour, which sold for a fortune when it was sold at all, and which nobody even knew how to make any more, since the Felyal burned. Her own crew were meanwhile keeping a good distance, and the Mantis-kinden were soon standing on her deck as though they had already taken the ship.
‘Well, it’s too late to refuse you now,’ she remarked drily, and Tomasso laughed again.
‘I’ll be leaving my man, Laszlo, here to watch over them,’ he explained. ‘You tell him, then he’ll tell them. Maker’s orders were for our friends to heed him.’
‘Let’s hope they remember that,’ Jaclen said. Most of her – the solid, businesslike majority born of twenty years’ hard work – felt that this situation was a barrel of firepowder just waiting for the spark. Some small sliver of her youth had reawoken within her, though. Wasn’t this one of those dreams that she’d had: to give it all over and turn raider? To raise sail and haul oar with the Mantis-kinden as they made free with the sea and all its plunder? And now she had her own complement of Mantis marines to spring on the next whoreson of a pirate that tried to take advantage of her.
The third time the Migrating Home had been taken, her Master at the time had tried to put up a fight. As the cargo was pillaged, the pirates had hanged the man and three of the Home’s crew from their rigging, just to make their point. It had been by random lot, and it could have been Jaclen left dangling and kicking, as easily as anyone else. A little core of steel inside her would be waiting with anticipation for the sight of a hostile sail.
The fight with the Assembly had seemed harder even than the Vekken siege, objection after objection hurled from the seats to strike home. Had Jodry not been Speaker, then the Companies would have been dissolved, with all the consequent trouble that would bring. As it was, there had been just enough of the Assembly who were proud of the city’s recent history to ensure that Outwright, Padstock and Marteus retained their commands, under the direct authority of the Assembly itself. It was not much of a force compared with the Ant city-states or a single Imperial army, but it would give Collegium a core of trained and well-armed soldiers when they were needed, which volunteer companies could then be formed around at need.
Of course, news of the Beetles’ new martial standing had spread fast, especially to the various foreign embassies, leading Stenwold inexorably on to his next piece of diplomacy.
He had chosen the room carefully: one of the College’s many odd little teaching rooms. So many of the College’s original buildings pre-dated the revolution: built to the Moths’ plan for their own inscrutable purposes, though built by Beetle hands. After the city – and the future – had changed hands, the people of the newly renamed Collegium had done their best with the spaces that the Moths had left them. However, it was not entirely the room’s dimensions that had attracted Stenwold, but its ornament. College rooms tended to inherit whatever random decoration had been bequeathed to the institution, so any blank space of wall was fair game for showing some masterwork or certificate or piece of gaudy tat that some kind benefactor had seen fit to give away. Stenwold now positioned himself beneath this room’s artistic burden and waited.
The three Vekken ambassadors arrived on the stroke of noon. They entered the room cautiously, as they always did: three pitch-skinned Ant-kinden, almost mirror images of one another, wearing tunics and sandals and sword belts. They had never learned the lesson the Tseni seemed to have picked up, that other kinden took note of ornament and spectacle. If Stenwold had passed them in the street, he would have assumed them too poor
