Empire in Black and Gold

him.’

‘You’re his friend, sir. From long ago.’

‘And I’m interested in him as he is now. You can speak freely about him to me. Unless you’d rather I tell him you disappointed me.’

Her expression hardened. ‘And if I tell him you were asking questions, sir?’

He smiled, because she had so very little but she was willing to make use of it. ‘Perhaps I want him to know. Although he may not thank you.’ He saw from her reaction that he was right. Ulther would not welcome his body slaves playing spy for him unless he had asked them to. ‘Tell me about his guests, then.’

That was safer ground. ‘They are officers, mostly, and merchants of the Consortium, sir. He entertains them.’

‘Oltan and Rauth, that lot. Quartermaster and intelligencer, aren’t they?’

‘So they say.’ He had been listening for that, the slight scorn in her voice.

‘You are a good subject of the Empire, are you not?’ he said softly.

‘I am a slave.’

‘But you know what serves the Empire and what does not, even so,’ he pressed. ‘So tell me, not what they say, but what you say.’ He would have offered her money, perhaps, but slaves had no right to possess money. She could never spend it without raising suspicion. He would have to find a harder currency. ‘Speak to me honestly and openly, and I will do what I can for you. This I promise.’

Her look revealed not one grain of trust at first, but he let her read his face, his eyes. She was desperate, although she herself had not known it until now. He had opened the slightest portal into the darkness where her life had gone. What choice did she have?

Salma’s smile was wan and waning. The cell was dark, night creeping in through the high grille on one wall, but Che could still see his smile, as though through a sheet of dusky glass.

‘It’s that girl, isn’t it?’ she said, knowing that the words made her sound petty. ‘I don’t see. . I mean, you’ve only known her for a few days, barely spoken to her.’

‘Ah, but it’s the gaps between the words that you can fall into,’ he said. ‘My people traditionally say that, but I never really appreciated it before. Perhaps it’s just because she’s a reminder of home.’

‘She is?’

‘The Butterfly-kinden. . it’s difficult to explain. Enclaves of them live within the bounds of the Commonweal, but they’re not really a part of our world.’ They came and went as they pleased, he recalled. He had never even seen one close to before, there were so few of them. They wanted for little, did not trade or toil. They had no need to. From the moment they were weaned from their mother’s milk the sun and their Art were enough to sustain them. They lived to dance, to sing and rejoice. They were special, life’s own chosen, and in the Commonweal they were respected. They went out into the world to perform, and for the love of performing, and they were gifted with fabrics and gems and applause. If they lived also beyond the Commonweal’s borders, he had not known it.

Except that those borders had changed. Some band of Butterfly-kinden somewhere must have greeted the dawn only to discover they were under the Empire’s shadow now.

He had heard others of his race speak about their fascinating beauty, their ethereal charms, but he had never credited it. Now he found his mind drawn back and back again to Grief in Chains. It was true she was new to him, so briefly arrived in his life, but as he sat here in darkness now, he felt the loss of her colours.

She had, he was beginning to realize, done something to him, touched him in some way. She had been trapped in chains, a slave. He had reached out to her. That had been consent enough for her to put her mark on him.

And Che was jealous, which amused him. His smile regained some of its life then, and Che remarked, ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’

‘Not at all,’ he said insincerely. ‘You’re right: we hardly spoke.’ But they had spoken. Whilst Che had dozed, as only a Beetle could in that thundering machine, Salma and Grief had sat close together. She had tried to paint her home for him but, depicted in her colours, he could not place it. Nowhere in his Commonweal was as bright as that. Afterwards, he had told her about himself: his family and his Kin-obligate, and his service to Stenwold.

He had promised that he would help her if he could, when he could not even help himself. He had somehow the feeling that this was an oath the universe would exact on him to fulfil. His people believed in oaths just like the Mantis-kinden, with whom they shared many traditions. Oaths were magic.

There was a rattle at the door, and he heard Che start up suddenly. The light that came in was cold lamplight, and two soldiers were silhouetted against it.

‘You,’ said one, pointing at Che. ‘Here, now.’

They took her to a room which had been some man’s study once. There was a large window shuttered on the east wall, and there were bare shelves and patches on the walls where tapestries had hung. Any original finery had been pirated for other rooms until the one adornment left to it was an ornate table. Behind the table stood Thalric, dressed only in a long tunic, with a knife but no sword at his belt. Her brief moment of hope died as she recalled that the Wasp-kinden never went unarmed, that their hands alone were weapons.

‘Leave us,’ he directed, even as the guards thrust her within. They backed out and closed the door on her. Thalric remained standing, arms folded, and he eyed her vacantly for a moment, in her grimy and haggard state. There seemed something different about him, some new tension or edge. He was clearly in the hold of some crisis that had little to do with her.

‘What do you want from me?’ she said, trying to find some courage in herself. Her voice quavered. It had been a long journey, a long time spent in the dark cell. She was hungry and tired and frustrated, not in the mood for this encounter, not remotely ready. She had an uneasy feeling, even then, that she did not have the emotional reserves necessary to deal with him — nor he with her. Still, he did not seem to register her defiance.

‘I’m here to listen to you,’ he said shortly.

‘Couldn’t sleep then? Do you want me to tell you a story?’ It was defiance born of a lack of any hope. Some part of her wanted it all over. She heard herself say the mocking words and braced herself, but he did not rise to them. He seemed curiously distracted, his mind partly elsewhere.

‘A story? Quite,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me I haven’t given you enough time to prepare.’ He sounded annoyed, as though she had summoned him here inconveniently in the middle of the night.

She folded her own arms, unconsciously mimicking his stance. ‘I have nothing to say. I’ve already told you, I won’t betray my friends.’

‘On the contrary, you have a great deal to say. Let’s start with Stenwold Maker’s plans, for example.’ Now he was finally rising to her words, but his ire was fuelled from something within.

What’s eating at you, Captain?

‘He never told me any of them,’ she said. ‘For this very reason, I suspect. He didn’t tell any of us and I wasn’t even supposed to be leaving Collegium. If your thugs hadn’t burst into our house that night I’d still be there.’ Still be whining about not going, too, I suppose. Oh, what I didn’t know, back then.

‘What a loss that would be. And your companions, those that are still free — the Spider wench and the half- breed — you have a great deal to say about them, I imagine.’ He was leaning forward against the table, and she matched him across it, almost nose to nose. She had been a penned-up slave all day and she was not in the mood, whereas he was off balance already, and suddenly she found herself pushing.

‘You’ve found out as much as I could tell you,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you have agents at the College reporting back to you?’

‘Listen, girl, this is your one remaining chance to exercise your own free will in this business. Tell me what you know.’

‘What I know? I know some history, Captain, and applied mechanics, a little medicine and a bit of nature lore. I have nothing else to tell you.’ She could sense the coiled spring of his temper.

‘Miss Maker-’

‘What? I know they’re my friends, and they would help me if they could, and I hope they’re all right, and I’m glad you haven’t caught them because they’re my friends, and that’s how it is between friends. I care for them. I hope they care for me. That’s friendship.’