provided.
‘We need help,’ said Che. ‘Uncle Sten has people here, so if we can only make contact. .’
‘Stenwold’s friends are compromised,’ he said seriously. ‘As you saw, they already managed to turn Bolwyn.’
A shiver went through Che’s stomach as she remembered what she had seen, and she put down her own bowl. ‘Salma, I’m going to say something very strange.’
That brought a hint of his smile back at last. ‘That’s something
‘Salma, when I saw Bolwyn, just before everything went wrong, he. .’ She put a hand to her forehead, feeling abruptly tired and frightened. ‘He. . I thought he. . He seemed to. .’ She pursed her lips in frustration at her inability to get the thought out. ‘He wasn’t Bolwyn — just for a moment. I know that sounds mad. I just. . I can’t explain it. It wasn’t make-up or a mask, and it wasn’t some new Art thing, because. .’
‘Because you always know Art when you see it,’ Salma put in for her. ‘Like that thing the Wasps do, with their lightning.
‘And this wasn’t. It. .’ She shuddered. ‘It was horrible. I don’t know what it was.’ Reviewing her last few words she felt abruptly disgusted with herself. ‘I’m sorry, I must have imagined it. There are more important things. .’
‘It must have been magic,’ Salma told her.
She laughed. ‘Of course, that’s just what it was. Magic.’
He continued to look at her, his slight smile still there, until she realized that he was being quite serious.
‘Magic?’ she asked him. ‘Salma, no offence, but there’s no such thing as magic. That’s just something that primitive people believe, or at least that people believed in before the revolution. Moth-kinden and that kind of thing, I mean. Come on now, magic?’
‘Primitive people, is it?’ His smile widened. ‘Like my people?’
‘Your people are sophisticated people, civilized people. Or that’s what you’re always telling us.’
He placed a hand on hers across the table, not as a gesture of intimacy but to impress on her the import of his words. ‘I believe in magic, Che. I’ve seen magic done. My Kin-obligate — in the place where I grew up, the prince there had a seer in his privy council who could see into the future.’
‘Salma, it’s easy enough to take a guess at what might happen. It’s a trick for the credulous, really.’
‘I saw him conjure up the soul of a dead man, and question it.’
Now it was her turn to smile. ‘I’m sure that there was a rational explanation. Smoke and mirrors and that kind of thing.’
‘The dead man was my father.’
She stopped whatever was about to come out of her mouth, and instead emptied her bowl of wine.
‘I heard him tell me about the Battle of Shan Real, where he had died. When I later heard the story from a soldier who had been there, it was all absolutely as my father’s shade described it.’
‘But Salma, that old wizard could already have heard it from a soldier as well — maybe someone fleeing the battle, ahead of the rest.’
Neither his gaze nor his smile faltered.
She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to offend you, Salma. You’re a friend — the best friend anyone could ask for. You saved my life and my uncle put his trust in you, but I don’t believe in magic. I’m sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘Of course. I won’t tell you about the Silver Faces then, because that wouldn’t change anything.’
‘And why would it change anything?’
He was openly grinning at her now, so that she still could not tell whether he was making fun or not. ‘Oh it’s just a legend, in any case, from long ago. It was said that they could capture your reflection in a mirror, you see. It was said, that way, they could get to look like anyone.’
Che’s stomach twisted again, seeing in her mind’s eye Bolwyn’s shifting face, but she fought it down.
‘They were the very first spies, apparently, and the best,’ Salma continued, voice low like a man telling a ghost story. ‘A secret order of intelligencers. No man could tell them apart from those they copied. They were just a myth, you’ll say, and I’m sure you’re right. True, they’re reported as fact in the chronicles of the Commonweal: from when we used them against our enemies, when our enemies used them against us. But this was long ago, before your revolution, and many strange things are reported in the earliest annals, that no one today, no young Beetle- kinden lass, anyway, would ever credit.’ He laughed at her expression that, behind its attempted defiance, now had a small child’s wide-eyed awe at the inexplicable. ‘Remember, your revolution never reached us, so we’re just ignorant primitives.’
‘It’s impossible to tell if you’re being serious.’
‘I hope so,’ he agreed. ‘Now, how are we going to track down Tynisa and Totho?’
‘Well, unless you can just magic them out of your robe,’ Che said, a little archly, ‘then I had better hunt down my relatives in Helleron, because they’ll know this city so at least they can help us look.’
It was a slum that Totho was led to. There was no other word for it. The skyline was dominated by the smokestacks of a factory whose long, uneven bulk rambled from here all the way down to the river. There were no windows in the pitted expanse of wall that now faced them, though huddled up to that blind countenance were hundreds of crooked little homes. Each had been built from whatever was ready to hand: wood, stone, brick and pieces of metal made each one an individual eyesore. There was no plan to them, either individually or in their general arrangement. The pathways between them were crooked, in-turning, shadowed both by the shacks and by the looming factory. The ground was little more than mud, under which fragmented cobbles occasionally shifted enough to twist an ankle.
Totho guessed that much of the slum’s populace must be out working, perhaps in that very factory, but there were still plenty of people about to watch him pass. Many were children, all thin and dirty, all staring at him. He had expected to be accosted, asked for money, but they kept their distance. He realized this was because his sword was still in his hand and, after that realization, it stayed there.
Depressingly, a large number of these people were halfbreeds. Most were Ant-Beetle crosses, just like himself, but there were some he could not even begin to identify, the mongrel results of a succession of taboo unions, or perhaps the get of kinden he did not yet know.
The adults he saw were evidently not interested in legal employment. One and all they gave him a level, assessing stare, but they had seen his guide and let him be. His guide was well known, even in shrouded outline.
Totho himself had already been given enough chance to study that uneven form. The man made a great show of his awkward, rapid shambling gait, but Totho noticed the way the cloak was pushed up and outwards by whatever was hidden underneath, and guessed this man was wearing armour, something outlandish and irregular, like some flashy prize-fighter. None of this made Totho happy about the present deal but if he stopped following now he would be lost, and then he would rapidly be prey.
His guide turned abruptly aside and went over to a door in one of the sloping shacks. A quick fumble with a key and he was inside, holding the door open and gesturing for Totho to follow him. Follow he did, but not without qualms and a close grip on his sword.
There was precious little light inside, and his benefactor seemed to have instantly disappeared. It was only when the back wall started to glow softly that he realized it was only a drape, with a lamp now lit behind it. He pushed his way carefully past the curtain.
‘Nine,’ said the voice of his guide as he did so. ‘Nine separate buildings.’ It answered his question.
From the outside this small terrace of ramshackle huts had looked no different from the others. On the inside it was revealed as all one, a single dwelling. The contours were, of necessity, irregular, and there were no internal walls, just posts to keep the undulating ceiling where it should be. More hanging drapes of hessian and wool were all his host had to differentiate sleeping quarters from kitchen, storeroom from workshop.
Totho stared. Of all the things he had thought of on entering that door, it was not this, and yet here was something as familiar to him as his own name. Most of the floorspace was given over to benches on which half a dozen mechanisms had been anatomied for repair. Between the benches he recognized a big upright grinder, a
