Empire in Black and Gold

with the effort of restraining it. ‘You have betrayed your own family, your city and your race. What should I do with you?’

‘Stenwold, I’m sorry-’

‘But you’re not. Or you’re sorry you’ve been found out. If a squad of Wasps turned up now, you’d sell me for as much as the market would bear. Shut up!’ He slammed the babbling merchant back against the wall. ‘You have no idea how much, how very much, I want to kill you, Elias. Every base and violent part of me is baying for it.’ He mustered all the control at his command and released the trembling man, stepped back. ‘I will not compound your betrayal by making myself a kinslayer, however. I do not think I could live with that.’

He sheathed his sword, unblooded still, and turned to go.

‘Stenwold, cousin. . thank you. .’ Elias gasped.

His back turned to the merchant, Stenwold paused in the doorway. ‘Tisamon, however, has no such qualms, I wager.’

‘What?’

Stenwold stepped out of the study and closed the door behind him, then went to sit on a chair in the hall, feeling utterly drained and disgusted by the world. Through the closed door behind him he heard Elias shrieking out his desperate offers to buy Tisamon’s soul. A fitting thing for him, Stenwold decided: dying with numbers on his lips.

After a moment Stenwold glanced round to see the Mantis emerge from the study, cleaning his blade meticulously with a piece of cloth cut from Elias’s robe. ‘Did you really think that I might turn my back on you?’ Tisamon said quietly.

Stenwold approached the Mantis-kinden wonderingly. ‘Look at that. You haven’t aged a moment in ten years.’

‘You have,’ Tisamon said uncharitably. ‘Older and balder and fatter. Mind you, you were never slim or well- haired.’

‘And young?’

‘It seems to me we were neither of us ever that young, even then.’

Left hand to left they clasped, and Stenwold noticed that the other man had aged, even so. The patches of white might be lost within his fair hair, but there were new lines on his face that bespoke a less than happy life.

‘What would you have done,’ the Mantis asked lightly, ‘if your message had not reached me?’ He did not say if I had not come.

Stenwold felt a lurch within him, at what would befall them both shortly. Himself and his oldest friend. ‘I would have fought,’ he said simply.

‘I think you would,’ Tisamon agreed.

‘How many would I have been fighting, then?’

‘Half a dozen of your locals, the same number of Wasp light infantry.’ Tisamon shrugged, as though to suggest it was nothing much to think about. Stenwold reminded himself: Barely a sound, all the while I was talking to Elias. Tisamon had earned his bread as assassin as well as duellist, even back then. He had treated the trade as the continuation of the duel by other means. There was not even a single spot of blood on his clothes.

‘We have a lot to catch up on,’ Stenwold said.

‘Less than you think. The past has been just keeping place for the future, hasn’t it? They’ve finished playing with the Commonweal and now they’re coming for us, at last.’

At last? But yes, of course Tisamon was looking forward to the Wasps’ next move. ‘You keep yourself informed?’

‘Helleron’s a hive of rumours, for those who will listen.’

‘And yet nobody will listen.’ Stenwold shook his head as he walked out of his dead cousin’s house, and had his sword immediately to hand. There was a man standing there, right outside the door: a Moth-kinden, Stenwold noted with surprise. No servant or creature of Elias’s then. ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘Not an assassin, as I had first assumed,’ came Tisamon’s voice from behind him. ‘In fact, something of a benefactor. He was creeping up on you even as you went in the door. He’d seen the Wasps, you see, and wanted to warn you,’ Tisamon said, ‘but sadly I was creeping up on him.’

Stenwold glanced back at the Moth. ‘You didn’t kill him then?’

‘Moth-kinden,’ said Tisamon. ‘Old habits die hard.’ Like the rest of the past, the ancient fealties of his people ran deep. ‘Old loyalties, we have,’ and he was smiling at Stenwold again like a ghost from seventeen years ago.

Stenwold turned back to the waiting Moth, who had not moved or made a sound all this time. He noticed the stranger was wounded and bandaged messily. He could not make the connection. ‘So where do you come in? What are the Wasps to you?’

‘I care nothing for them. But I wanted to warn you.’

‘Warn me?’

‘I saw your niece being taken,’ said the Moth without much inflection, keeping his expression guarded.

‘You saw Cheerwell?’ Suddenly Stenwold came alive. The Moth backed off smoothly as he approached.

‘She. . helped me,’ he said.

Stenwold stopped before he forced the man out of the door. ‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he said, and then: ‘I understand now. You must be from Tharn. A raider, are you?’

The Moth nodded cautiously. ‘My name. . is Achaeos.’

‘Well, right now Helleron doesn’t have much claim on my loyalty,’ announced Stenwold. ‘The master of this house, my cousin Elias Monger, lies dead in the next room, and I imagine your grand high potentates or whatever they’re called are going to be rubbing their hands over that.’

‘They will shed no tears,’ Achaeos agreed.

‘Tell me about Cheerwell. Where is she?’

Achaeos related all that he had witnessed without emotion. He had a trained eye for detail, Stenwold noted: here was a man used to spying out the enemy. The thought that he, Stenwold, might be one of that enemy was a strange one. With a very few exceptions the Moth-kinden were a race he had never had much to do with.

‘They took them where?’

‘South and east. I know the city has slave camps located at its edge,’ Achaeos reported. Stenwold had no idea whether Moths kept slaves these days, and nothing in the man’s tone enlightened him.

Stenwold rubbed at his chin, feeling the stubble grown there. ‘You have no idea how hard I pushed in order to make the time I did. If all this had happened in a month’s time I’d have had a completed railroad to carry me straight here from Collegium. As it is, this last tenday and more, I’ve hopped on at least five different forms of transport, and still I’m too late. Too late by a single day.’

‘You’ll go after her.’ For Tisamon it was a rhetorical question.

‘She’s my niece, and she’s with another of my students. I’ll go after them both.’ Stenwold bared his teeth in something like a smile. ‘I shall not lack for help, though. Do you remember Scuto the Thorn Bug?’

‘Remember him?’ said Tisamon. ‘I’ve turned down three contracts to kill him.’

Stenwold maintained the semblance of a smile. These histories we do not ask about. ‘I shall go to him now. He’s bored into this city like a grub. For information or material, I shall not lack for help.’

‘My blade is yours,’ Tisamon said, so simply that Stenwold stared at him.

‘I had not thought. .’

‘I told you.’ The Mantis looked down. ‘I have been marking time all these years. Did you think I would turn from you now?’

They had met perhaps three times, after the siege at Myna. Sometimes Tisamon had helped in Stenwold’s intelligencing, at the start. As the work changed, and watching and waiting became more important than a swift blade, there had been less need to call upon him. Meanwhile College work had claimed Stenwold more and more and they had gone their separate ways. It had been ten years since they had last seen each other.

‘I. . don’t know what to say,’ the Beetle stammered. A terrible feeling of doom hung over him: