not sure whether that was true.
‘I have a service I can perform for you. It may come to nothing, but you have said you have had little progress with the Ancestor Art.’
‘It’s no secret,’ she agreed. ‘I suppose there are always some like me.’
‘Of course, but amongst your people, where you have your thousands and more, it passes notice. Here each man and woman counts, for we are fewer than you think. We have ways of aiding meditation, of raising the mind to the correct state.’
‘You’re serious?’ She was wide-eyed now. ‘If you think there’s even the smallest chance that it could work I’ll do it, whatever it is. Please, Achaeos, you can’t imagine how long. .’
He nodded. ‘You should sit and face the fire. Close your eyes, or stare into it, just as you prefer.’
She did so. When she closed her eyes the dancing of the fire came through her eyelids, more as the warmth that passed over her face than light itself. ‘What do I do next?’
‘Nothing. Relax and let your mind go. . where it will. .’ His voice seemed uncertain, but she kept her eyes shut.
His hands dropped onto her shoulders, making her start, and she realized he must be kneeling behind her. She steadied her breathing, tried all the meditative tricks her tutors had once given her to take her mind off the here and now.
She felt his fingers trace a path over her shoulders, and then dig in, his thumbs firm against her shoulder blades, and he began to gently knead the flesh there through her tunic. A shiver went through her, and her concentration went to pieces, but his hands seemed to hold her pinioned, as though she was manacled like Salma had been by the Wasps. She wanted to say something, tell him that he was not helping in any way, but his hands seemed to be smoothing calmness into her very muscles, prying and easing about her neck and working down her spine. They moved with infinite patience and delicacy, like an artificer deconstructing a machine piece by piece — save that now she was the machine.
The Mynan homespun cloth was scratchy under his touch, though. Its coarseness scraped against her back. His fingers eased past the collar, between the cloth and her skin, searching across her exposed shoulders. She saw, with a catch of breath, how this would normally be done and, before her nerve could fail her, she took hold of her tunic’s hem. Her arms felt oddly leaden but she was able to drag it halfway up, muffling herself within it. His hands paused for a moment, fingertips trailing. She was shocked by her own daring but equally she knew that this was how it was meant to be.
He removed the garment from over her head, slid it up her arms and cast it away into the unseen room behind her. She felt an instant chill across her belly and breasts, and then the fire’s heat straight after. Her back felt numb but comfortably warm.
His hands settled again on her bare shoulders, and she could not suppress a sharp intake of breath. The hands began to work again, from the start, slowly and carefully smoothing and clenching their way across her skin, levelling out the knots and aches that had been with her since Myna, pulling and working over her shoulder blades and along the curve of her back with infinite care. How could she meditate when her whole mind was taken up with those hands? Delicate hands, but with an archer’s strength in them. They were slowly kneading their way into her very mind. She could not possibly concentrate, with her body so loose and distant, and with him so close.
‘Lie down,’ he said in her ear, and she found herself lying full length on the rug, its soft weave pressing against her cheek. He was straddling her hips, his hands still engaged in their dulling progress, now rubbing and squeezing at the bulge of her waist. She had forgotten to concentrate, but instead she lay there with her eyes closed, being eased away from herself, drifting out towards the very far shore of consciousness.
And it seemed gradually as though there was a third presence in the nebulous darkness of the room, somehow beyond the walls, or on the far side of the fire. Something vast and undefined, beyond anything her mind could grasp, and yet it knew her, and loved her as it loved all its children.
And she felt his hands on her shoulders once more, trembling, and then his breath on her neck, and his lips brushed her ear, and kissed her cheek. From the depths of her drifting daze she heard him say, ‘I am lost to you. I am drowning in you. Help me.’
With sluggish motion, revelling in every sensation of it, her skin against his, her skin against the softness of the rug, she turned over to face him, and heard his breath catch in quiet wonder. At last she opened her eyes to meet his, and even in their blank whiteness she read a longing, a yearning that chimed in perfect accord with her own.
She tugged at his own tunic, drawing it from him by measured degrees, seeing again his lean frame, the fateful scar on his side, mostly healed by now. She drew a lazy finger across it and saw him shiver. He was the mystic, but in that moment the tide that carried her was the heartbeat of the world, and she drew him along helpless with her.
‘Achaeos,’ she breathed. She was still adrift on the dizzying sea of his touch, of his spell, whatever it had been. She was so full of love for him that tears ran down her cheeks until he kissed them away, and she drew him down to her breasts and lost herself to the universe, and to him.
And towards dawn she woke, and found him still sleeping beside her, one arm softly holding her to him as though he feared she would be gone.
Gently, she eased herself from beneath it and got herself dressed. The fire was now embers but she felt none of the night’s chill.
She went out onto the balcony, spread her wings and flew.
Thirty-six
There was little enough goodwill left amongst the thirteen magnates who governed Helleron. If Stenwold, coming with his apocalyptic warnings, had been a stranger to them, he would have been thrown out onto the street, or worse. As it was, one of the two councillors whose marker he supposedly held had made it clear that he neither remembered nor cared to meet anyone by the name of Stenwold Maker.
There remained one honest man in the city, although, after all the time and effort it took to wheedle his way through the man’s lackeys and subordinates, Stenwold was ready to wager that it was just the one, and his name was Greenwise Artector. If his family, as the surname suggested, had once earned their bread by designing buildings, now their wealth came from owning them: renting them by the tenday to the swarming hordes that came looking for new hope on Helleron’s teeming streets. Whole warrens of the poor quarters were now in Artector hands. It suggested an uncertain moral basis on which to place trust, but Stenwold was without options, and at least the man agreed to see him.
They met in a chocolate house three avenues away from the Councillar Chambers. It was the latest vice amongst the very rich, Stenwold understood: drinking chocolate, brought from the Spiderlands at vast expense, was apparently the mark of a gentleman. Stenwold prudently left it to Greenwise’s tab.
Greenwise Artector was a man only a few years Stenwold’s senior. His slighter waist was a corset, his fuller head a wig. When they had first met, the younger Greenwise had dyed his hair grey and drawn on wrinkles for the then current fashion of sagacity and wisdom. Now truly a man of that age, he shammed youth now that the tastes of the cultivated had changed. He wore even more finery than Stenwold remembered: his coat was elaborate red brocade slashed with cloth of gold, and the sword he sported had a hilt of rare metals and precious stones, and had surely never so much as left its scabbard. After all, he had other people to draw weapons for him. Three of them hovered at a discreet distance, near the chocolate-house door, Beetle-kinden brawlers with mace and crossbow and mail shirts visible beneath their long coats.
The general expression on Greenwise’s face was the only thing about him that had not changed; it was what had made Stenwold deal with him initially and what brought Stenwold to him now. It was built of world-weary cynicism and a wry humour, and that reflected an honesty of a sort.
‘You’re a troublemaker, Sten,’ grumbled the magnate. ‘Every time you’re in town we find bodies lying in the alleys. One might almost think you make a living as an assassin, or at our age perhaps just broker for them. True?’
‘Hardly.’
