Empire in Black and Gold

sense of balance and partly through her Art, which had allowed her to go hand over hand up the walls when the upper floors had been too frail to support her. Now she stretched a leg out, testing the strength of a beam. The floorboards it had once supported were perishing to beetle-grubs and time, but the footing she found was solid.

‘Totho couldn’t get up here, nor Che or Stenwold,’ Salma went on. He was sitting in a nook, beneath a roof that was peppered with holes. One of the shafts of wan sunlight touched his face, and made it more golden still. ‘The Mantis or the Moth wouldn’t care where I went or what I did. Which just leaves you. You’ve got some words for me, no doubt?’

His resting place was close to where the beam met the wall, and she took a few steps along it, shifting her shoulders slightly to stay level. ‘What game are you playing now, O hero of the Commonweal?’ she asked him.

‘No idea. I’m still waiting for someone to tell me the rules,’ he replied.

‘Che says it’s because of some dancer.’ She put a lot of venom into the word, more than she had meant.

‘Well, my people are great patrons of the arts,’ he told her flippantly and she yelled, ‘Will you be serious for once in your cursed life?’ and heard the words jumble and blur into the echo all the way down to the cellars. She might just have called the entire Empire down on the resistance, but for all that she could not have kept the words in.

‘I was a slave,’ he said simply, not rising to the bait at all. ‘I was a prisoner. They took the sky from me. They made me serious, I assure you.’

‘Then why are you going? Why not stay with us? With your friends, who. . with people who love you? Don’t tell me it’s just some great crusade to free the Empire one slave at a time.’

‘I won’t tell you that, no.’ His face, in the sunlight, was beautiful. She was itching to punch it.

‘Che says that she, that woman, used her Art on you, or worse.’

Salma shrugged, no more than that.

‘You love her more than you love us, is that it?’

He looked at her sadly. ‘Perhaps love means different things to different kinden,’ he said softly. ‘I cannot ignore her.’

But you can ignore me? She found that her hand had gone to the hilt of her new rapier without her meaning it. As soon as she realized, it took a great effort of will not to draw the blade.

‘Salma. .’

He stood up abruptly, in a brief flurry of wings, to land within her sword’s reach on the beam, facing her. The muscles in her arm twitched and in her mind, rising from a thousand years of buried heredity, came the words, Challenge him.

‘No. .’ she said to herself, staring at his face.

Challenge him. It is the only way you will win him. Show him your skill. Defeat him.

She was trembling. The voices of a host of Mantis-kinden had clawed their way free of her ignorance and her Collegium upbringing. Salma just watched her patiently. Part of her was amazed that he had not taken up his own sword. Fight! howled part of her mind. Fight me!

She jerked, the rapier rattling in its scabbard, and abruptly she had lost her balance, teetering on the beam. Instantly he had stepped in, arms about her to steady her, and for a moment she let herself rest against his chest, the voices in her head banished.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m still going. I have no choice.’ Once he was sure she was steady, he stepped from the beam and let his wings carry him gently downwards, leaving her to make her own halting way.

With the Wasps still waiting for the resistance to rise against them, leaving the city without being seen was easy enough, tucked away amidst one of Hokiak’s caravans, with a few coins paid to the guards to forestall too detailed a search. The last thing the Empire expected of its enemies just now was for them to leave. Once beyond the walls it was Khenice who led them: a line of hooded travellers who might be no more than a band of locals out to slingshot moths or gather night-growing mushrooms. They left as the sky was darkening, but there was light enough from the west by the time Khenice found their rendezvous point.

There was nobody there, nor any horses, but the old Mynan told them to wait. It was only a minute or two before a voice from the gloom startled them.

‘If you’re not those I’m waiting for, I’m going straight home and selling the horses.’ It was a voice strangely accented, and the figure that stepped out in front of them was stranger still. Che let her Art-eyes adjust to the darkness, and what had seemed at first like a very lanky Fly-kinden was revealed as something quite other.

Skrill, as Hokiak had named her, was a halfbreed, and part of her blood must be local Mynan, for she had their shade of skin and hair, and something of their look. Her face was thinner, though, and her ears were back-sloped, long and pointed, with a nose and chin almost as sharp. Her build was the most disconcerting aspect of her, though. She was very small in the body, like a Fly-kinden or child indeed, but her limbs were overlong, not grotesquely but certainly enough to notice, so that despite her lack of height the strides she took would match a tall man’s. Her movements were jerky, either a quick dash or standing very still. Beneath her cloak was a cuirass of metal scales, padded with felt for quiet movement. The packroll slung across her back had the two ends of a bow protruding from it, and there was a Wasp-issue shortsword bald-ricked up enough for the hilt to be almost hidden in her armpit. Beside her high-pitched voice there was little of the feminine about her, and her angular features rendered her androgynous.

‘Don’t stare at the lady,’ she chided them, for that was what they had been doing. ‘Now which one of you great lords is Master Stenwold Maker? I hear you’ve a job for me.’

‘And a companion too,’ Stenwold agreed, beckoning Salma over. She looked the Dragonfly up and down. ‘I reckon I don’t mind that at all, Master Maker.’

Stenwold took both her and Salma aside, while Khenice began building a fire.

His flier was ready for him in the airfield, Thalric knew. His possessions, so few, were already packed. He knew he should leave the palace, and Myna itself, before Colonel Latvoc decided that his refusals qualified as disloyalty. In truth, he would have departed two days ago, if not for the visitor.

Thalric now stood by the workbench of the interrogation room and thought hard about that encounter because it had brought on him a sense of creeping discomfort that he had yet to shake off.

It had seemed reasonable enough when a Wasp officer of middle years had arrived asking for him. The face had seemed vaguely familiar, but the number of such men that he had met was in the hundreds so he had thought nothing of it.

In the small room commandeered as his office, he had been finishing his report for the colonel when the man came in. After a brief glance up he had returned to it, saying, ‘What can I do for you, soldier?’

‘Oh Major, surely you can do better than that.’

The use of his true rank had snapped his head up, thinking that this must be a Rekef matter. The officer was not standing to attention like a soldier should, and that face was becoming maddeningly familiar. .

And then it had struck him like a physical blow. It was his own face he was looking at. Not an identical copy, which would have caused comment, but it could have been some extra brother he did not know about and the voice was one he knew as well.

‘Scylis?’ he had said softly, and the Wasp officer nodded with a smile that was most un-Wasplike.

‘Well done, Major, although I did rather make it easy for you.’

Thalric remembered looking in vain for the edge of a mask, the sign of make-up. This was the first time he had clearly seen any face that Scylis had chosen to put up. There was no mask, nothing but that living face. It had sent a shiver of horror through him — horror at the unaccountable.

‘I really could have used you three days ago,’ he had said to disguise his shock. ‘You do pick your moments to turn up.’

‘And meanwhile your operation in Helleron is wondering if you’re still alive. I decided I was best suited to tracking you down. Travelling as a Wasp officer within the Empire has its benefits. I might even consider it as a retirement option.’

Thalric had carefully not asked where Scylis had obtained the armour he was wearing.

And then there had been the gift, for Scylis had not arrived empty handed. He had been in the city long enough to learn which way was up, politically. He had brought in a prisoner for interrogation.